Building FanCode's Tennis Live Experience — A Gamble Against the Clock
A live tennis experience for Indian fans — rich stats, multi-court switching, visual tournament navigation — shipped across three platforms in three weeks for Roland Garros 2025. Getting there meant cutting a platform from scope, changing our build approach mid-flight, and gambling that experience depth could outweigh a rival's content advantage. It didn't pay off — that's the real story here.
Lead UX Designer
2025
App, Web, & TV
Tennis
Roland Garros 2025
Challenge
Indian tennis fans were choosing between expensive international platforms (~$17/month) or fragmented domestic coverage. Worse, no platform helped fans follow a Grand Slam as a whole — 30–40 matches running simultaneously for two weeks.
We didn't hold exclusive streaming rights to this tournament; a rival OTT did. So the real brief was: can a richer experience earn fans and revenue when we can't win on content exclusivity? We had three weeks to find out.
Decisions Under Constraint
Cut Mobile Web from launch.
Four platforms at parity in three weeks risked shipping all of them poorly. We protected App, Desktop Web, and TV — where Stream Switcher and Tournament Draw could land well — and let Mobile Web go.
Gambled on depth over exclusivity
The rival had direct streaming access to the same matches. Our bet: real-time stats, court switching, and a real tournament draw would be enough to pull fans to FanCode — and that tennis's affluent Indian audience would tolerate paying a bit more for it.
Discovery
Fans were using two devices simultaneously during matches — one to stream, one to check stats — because no single platform did both. That gap became the brief.
Content Strategy
We structured the experience as three discovery layers — Sport → Tournament → Match — so fans could move fluidly between watching, scanning the draw, and switching courts.
Design Decisions
Match Detail Page: Live scorecard, live stats (aces, break points, unforced errors), head-to-head context — built to scale across portrait, landscape, and fullscreen.
Stream Switcher: Let entitled users hop between live matches without leaving the player. The hard part was the entitlement matrix — mapping every ownership state (full, mixed, blocked) to a clean in-context response.
Tournament Draw: A visual bracket, R64 to Final, filterable by round and category — every match card a live entry point to watch or check scores. A navigation tool that became a discovery surface.
Outcome & What We Learned
The build hit every mark under real pressure. The gamble didn't: experience depth wasn't enough to offset the rival's content advantage. Fans who could get the match elsewhere didn't convert in the numbers we needed.
The lesson was strategic, not executional: when a competitor holds the content, experience is a differentiator, not a replacement. We overestimated how far surround-experience could substitute for access, and underestimated fan price sensitivity even in a sport seen as "elite."
Conclusion
Tennis is one of several new-vertical bets FanCode has run — including live marathon streaming, with similarly mixed results. Not every bet pays off, but each sharpens the next one. Knowing precisely why this one didn't was worth more than a clean win would have been.