The opportunity
Filipinos love basketball. Not in the abstract, in the plan-your-Sunday sense. PBA games are appointment viewing for millions in the Philippines and an even bigger emotional anchor for the diaspora abroad: ~12 million Filipinos working overseas, most of them keeping a thread back home through whatever stream they can find.
The problem: there was no single, legitimate, second-screen-aware home for Filipino sports outside the Philippines. Fans were stitching together fan-cam YouTube uploads, pirate streams, and four chat apps just to keep up. Pilipinas Live came in as the answer, a launch product on the Quickplay OTT platform, with HumanX leading the design.
I was the lead designer for the launch implementation. The brief: ship a global Filipino sports OTT across web, iOS, Android, Apple TV, and smart-TV, and do it in a way that the platform underneath could reuse for the next four clients on the roadmap.
The problem
Sports OTT is its own design discipline. The patterns from VOD-first platforms (Netflix, Disney+) don't transfer cleanly. The patterns from generic news/entertainment OTT (Cignal Play, Hotstar) don't either.
What I had to design around:
- Live is the product, VOD is the long tail. When a live game is on, every other surface decision has to defer to it. When no live game is on, the home screen has to make replays and highlights feel as urgent as live.
- Second-screen is the norm. Most Filipino sports fans are watching the game on the TV and using their phone for chat, stats, and team news. The product has to acknowledge that, not fight it.
- Free-vs-premium is the business model. A free top-of-funnel was non-negotiable for diaspora reach; the premium tier had to feel worth it without locking out the moments that drive emotional engagement.
- Multi-surface from day one. Five surfaces had to ship simultaneously, each with the right input model (remote vs. touch vs. mouse) and the right reading distance (lean-back vs. lean-forward).
How I worked
1. Primary research, fans, the diaspora, the broadcaster
The HumanX research track ran in parallel with the platform engineering work. I sat in on interviews with fans in Manila and the diaspora (US, Saudi, Singapore), and worked off the broadcaster team's audience data. The diaspora half of the audience consistently surfaced behaviors the home audience didn't, multi-time-zone scheduling, tighter group-chat rhythms, much higher willingness to pay for legitimate access.
2. Jobs-to-be-done, what fans hire the product for
The JTBD frame helped separate "watch the game" from "follow the game", different jobs, different surfaces, different priorities. Live-game viewing got the lean-back treatment on TV. Following-the-game got the lean-forward treatment on phones, with score overlays, schedules, and team news pinned where the thumb naturally lands.
3. Information architecture, five surfaces, one story stream
The IA was the central deliverable. Each surface had to feel native to its input model while sharing the same content taxonomy (Live, Schedule, Replays, Teams, Highlights, News). The free-vs-premium boundary lives in IA, not in pricing, which screens, which moments, which features.
4. Benchmarking + interventions + ideation
Before any wireframe, the team and I walked through every comparable sports OTT (live and on-demand), pulled out the patterns that worked, and sketched the interventions Pilipinas Live could ship that the others couldn't. The slides below are the working artifact, open them to see the slide-by-slide reasoning.