• Users consistently preferred watching a scene over reading metadata. A short clip communicated tone, pacing, and quality faster than thumbnails ever could.
• Clips were more persuasive than trailers. Trailers explained the plot. Clips conveyed the actual viewing experience. That emotional signal drove confidence.
• On TV, behavior was fast and intentional. Users skimmed aggressively and rarely watched full previews. The experience functioned as a rapid filtering tool rather than a destination.
• The feature’s value depended heavily on relevance. When content felt personalized, such as favorite genres, similar titles, and “For You” cues, engagement increased. When it felt random, interest dropped quickly.

• Users immediately understood the short form format and compared it to social feeds. That familiarity lowered the barrier to interaction.
• Engagement per clip was noticeably longer than on TV. Some users lingered or watched full previews before moving on.
• Vertical scrolling felt intuitive for most users, aligning with existing muscle memory. Platform-native interaction patterns mattered more than brand consistency.
• While discovery remained the primary goal, a secondary use case emerged: casual browsing during downtime. The feature began to function as light entertainment, not just a decision tool.
• As on TV, personalization was critical. The experience only sustained attention when it reflected users’ tastes and viewing history.

• The mirror background effect was the hardest part to translate into code because it needed to look like true full-bleed portrait video, while actually being a live composite of a mirrored reflection, blur, and gradient alpha mask that fades cleanly at the seam.
• We explored heavier render paths (including a Metal-based approach and ideas like pulling frames via AVFoundation and blurring downsampled buffers), but ultimately landed on a UIKit-native solution using UIBlurEffect for the reflection layer to keep playback smooth and battery-friendly while reusing the existing video stream instead of effectively rendering it twice.

Mobile

• Reworked primary navigation by moving My List to "Profile" to make room for a new "Clips" nav item
• Presented subnavigation as clip categories to work around unified "For You" feed complexity for the initial test

CTV

• Started with a contextual entry point prompted through Homepage carousels
• Minimized scope for initial test by leveraging existing content curation and video preview functionality as a jumping-off point