A TV box to disconnect

Shelduck TV approached us to help design a Slow TV box that would showcase their stunning aerial footage. They came away with more than they expected: not only a working prototype with an attractive design, but also valuable business tips.

Sleek design and hefty processing power

Breathtaking aerial shots of the world’s most beautiful landscapes, stored in a compact TV box: that’s the vision that spurred Valais resident Baptiste Mabillard to create Shelduck TV. His drone shots—and those of his partners—will soon adorn displays in waiting rooms and lounges at doctors’ offices, hospitals, airports or hotels, giving people the opportunity to escape from everyday life for a few moments.

But to wow his prospective clients during sales pitches, Mabillard needed a minimum viable product—that is, a working prototype TV box. So the young entrepreneur brought his request to us. The requirements for the box were clear: high quality, an attractive design, and—contrary to today’s “stream everything” trend—enough memory and processing power to store the video recordings locally on the TV box itself.

Creaholic took this project brief and ran with it, putting together an interdisciplinary team from the fields of electronics, user interface design, and industrial design.

Intuitive user interface

After choosing a sufficiently powerful circuit board—the heart of the TV box—the design of the user interface began. We developed an attractive, intuitive user interface that drew inspiration from Shelduck TV’s corporate identity and from the video content.

Next we recreated this design as accurately as possible in Kodi—an open-source software tool for media players. This was no easy task: Kodi is built for commercial content and automatically populates the selection menu with movie posters, images, subtitles and taglines pulled from the internet. However, the drone videos used on the TV box are small-scale productions by private individuals and do not have any of this supplemental material.

What’s more, the box would ideally not be internet-enabled to ensure the best possible playback quality and (network) security. So thumbnails, video descriptions and tags had to be created manually and stored in the UI.

Inspired by Zen

When it was time to design the actual TV box, Creaholic got a pitch document from Shelduck TV with keywords to help direct the overall creative direction. It was immediately clear that they didn’t want a traditional, square TV box, but instead an unusual, minimalist design.

Therefore our product designers worked up examples according to several different guiding principles, such as “modern performance”, “modern elegance, “Zen elegance” or “Zen perfection”—Baptiste Mabillard was then able to select his favourites. We used an iterative method of working to further refine the design: one by one potential shapes and materials were worked out, investigated, and combined with one another. Feedback from Shelduck TV directly influenced the progress of each subsequent development round.

And that’s how we reached the final design for the TV box prototype: a sleek, flat shape, rendered in black with wood grain, reminiscent of a stone in an Eastern Zen garden, and perfectly suiting the meditative energy of Shelduck TV’s drone videography.

3 months to MVP

Our work wasn’t just limited to developing the TV box prototype. We also assisted the young visionary entrepreneur Mabillard with his business concerns: in everything from creating web-driven sales channels to the considerations for advertising and service processes, Shelduck TV received valuable input from us in order to successfully mass produce its TV box. In other words, we offered a holistic development that not only covered the technical and aesthetic aspects of the TV box, but the business aspects as well.

After just three months, Shelduck TV has a working prototype of their TV box that they can easily use in sales pitches. As soon as it’s connected to the screen, the main menu appears, from which the desired clip can be selected and played.

Preorder now!

Baptiste Mabillard

Managing Director, Shelduck TV

«At Creaholic an incredible world awaits you, filled with talented people who share the common goal of making your dream come true. By working together, you become part of a larger family. And don’t forget about the support that goes far beyond the project. Their excellent team will be by your side in whatever complicated situation you find yourself. In short, if I was going to Mars tomorrow and had the chance to work with one company, I’d choose Creaholic without any hesitation.»

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