Sky Live, Watch Together

01 · Outcome

Shipped and measured

Watch Together launched in June 2023 as part of a Sky Live software update. Post-launch engagement data confirmed the core design hypothesis: usage peaks during Prime and Early Prime time bands, exactly the living-room, evening co-viewing context the product was built for.

Session distribution shows users engaging 1–5 times per week, reflecting purposeful, social usage rather than casual browsing. Daily launches showed a week-over-week upward trend in the weeks following launch.

~12K

Weekly active Sky Live devices

~36 min

Average session length

Prime

Peak usage time, validating the social TV use case

1–5

Typical weekly sessions per user

Scalable UX foundation

Entry point patterns, PiP overlays, and room-code flows were adopted into the wider Sky TV design system, extending impact beyond Watch Together itself.

Cross-functional alignment

Influenced engineering, product, and partnerships through a clear, prioritised design vision, shaping how Sky Live evolved beyond its core camera use cases.

02 · Challenge

The problem space

Sky Live is the smart camera for the living room, enabling video calling, fitness, and interactive TV experiences. Despite being inherently social hardware, it had no way for users to watch content together remotely.

The brief: design a seamless, TV-first experience that balanced social interaction with uninterrupted viewing, while accommodating varied living-room setups, lighting conditions, and user comfort levels.

How might we create seamless co-viewing experiences that help households feel connected?

Deliverable

End-to-end UX for Watch Together: entry points, onboarding, call setup, synchronised playback, error states, and cross-device behaviour.

Audience

Sky customers, early adopters, and fans of sports and reality TV seeking richer social TV experiences, often watching in groups across different homes.

03 · Research Context

Research context

Research conducted by Sky's Global Entertainment Research team surfaced a clear emotional need: users wanted to feel present with remote family and friends, not just watch the same content simultaneously. I used this insight to define the experience goals that shaped every design decision.

The research identified two distinct watch-together journeys, which informed how entry points and session flows were designed:

Content-led

The content drives the occasion. Users choose a specific programme or event first, then invite others to join, such as a live match or a series finale.

Occasion-led

The social occasion comes first. Users want to spend time together and browse or select content as a group, with connection taking priority over any specific programme.

04 · Experience Goals

Experience goals

Four experience goals shaped every design decision:

Minimise friction

A simple 9-digit room code eliminated the need for user-lookup or friend graphs, reducing cognitive load and technical barriers to joining a session.

Maximise connection

Video calling with auto-framing and echo cancellation made every watch session a genuine shared experience, not just parallel viewing.

Respect platform constraints

A lightweight, non-disruptive overlay preserved Sky Live's existing user journeys. Watch Together had to feel additive, never interruptive.

Drive engagement

Creating a reason to return to Sky Live repeatedly, increasing platform stickiness and overall device value for Sky customers.

05 · Design Process

From MVP to shipped product

The project evolved across three phases, each building on the last, with increasing scope and complexity. I moved from Senior UX Designer on the first MVP into a lead role as the product expanded.

2021 - First MVP

Designed the core Watch Together experience: room creation via 9-digit code, synchronised playback, and video calling with PiP. Established the interaction model and design foundations.

2022 - Expanding the experience

Stepped into a lead role as the feature expanded. Integrated multiple entry points across Live Guide, VOD rails, and full-screen playback. Added active speaker view and refined camera controls.

2023 - Post-launch

Led post-launch QA and analysed user feedback to identify friction points and fast-follow opportunities. Defined a prioritised backlog and explored how Watch Together could extend across Sky's broader ecosystem.

2021 · First MVP

Establishing the interaction model from scratch: how a TV screen becomes a shared social space.

2022 · Expanding the experience

Integrating Watch Together into an existing product without disrupting the journeys users already knew.

2023 · What could have come next

One of the biggest unsolved problems with Watch Together was identity. The product shipped with no concept of a persistent user, meaning every session started from scratch with no history, no preferences, and no way to reconnect with the same people. We mapped a three-stage roadmap to fix this. The project was descoped in 2024 before any of it shipped.

Stage 1 · Screen name

A lightweight, session-based display name. No account required. The lowest-friction way to give users a sense of presence and make sessions feel personal without introducing sign-in friction.

Stage 2 · TV ID

A persistent identity tied to the Sky account, enabling recognisable names across sessions and laying the groundwork for a social graph, invite history, and favourite contacts.

Stage 3 · True personalisation

Full user profiles with viewing preferences, watch history, and smart suggestions for what to watch together, turning Watch Together from a feature into a social destination.

Watch Together · Film

See it in action

Reflection

What I took from it

Three years, three phases, five teams, one blank canvas. Designing Watch Together from scratch on hardware with no social precedent meant building the interaction model and the design rationale simultaneously, with no existing pattern to follow.

Getting it shipped was its own design problem. Navigating across Sky's product, design, and engineering teams, each with their own priorities and ways of working, meant the hardest constraints weren't always technical.

Moving from Senior UX Designer into a lead role mid-project brought its own challenge: holding a clear design vision across a multi-year timeline while team composition, product scope, and business priorities all kept shifting. That balance between consistency and adaptability is what I carried most from this project.

Sky Live’s Watch Together