Rebuilding SonyLIV's subscription funnel, +22% paid subscribers

SonyLIV was growing fast. The platform had 350M+ registered users, a library expanding with cricket, originals, and international content, and a subscription model that was supposed to monetise that audience. It wasn't working.

Our Android TV funnel was the worst offender. Session data showed that users who reached the subscription paywall were leaving at a rate that translated to millions of rupees in monthly lost revenue. The problem wasn't awareness, it wasn't content, and it wasn't pricing, it was the moment users had to make a decision about what to buy.

The PM framing was stark: the funnel was technically functional, but functionally broken. We needed to fix it.

Before touching a single frame, the team ran a structured journey-mapping workshop. We put every touchpoint on the wall — what the user does, what the advisor does, what the system does — and physically arranged them as a flow using sticky notes.

The exercise surfaced something quickly: the subscription path wasn't one flow, it was three overlapping ones depending on how the user arrived. Someone coming from a content recommendation behaved differently to someone who had directly searched for a plan. The existing UI treated them identically.

That session also revealed a cluster of steps that existed purely for technical reasons, not user reasons. Steps that engineers had added to satisfy backend constraints but that added zero clarity for the person holding a remote. Those became the first candidates for removal.

I started with session recordings and ran remote usability sessions with a panel of Android TV users. The same pattern emerged again and again. Users would reach the plan selection screen, slow down, start pressing directional keys back and forth, and eventually back out entirely.

In their own words: 'I couldn't work out what I was actually getting with the more expensive plan' and 'I wanted to just click Subscribe but I had to go through too many screens first.'

The plans were presented as a flat list. Feature differences were described in small-print labels that were almost unreadable at TV viewing distance. Pricing per duration was buried. There was no hierarchy, every plan looked equally weighted, which meant users had to do the comparison work themselves, with a remote control, from across the room.

On a mobile touch interface, this might have been manageable. On a 10-foot interface with directional navigation, it created decision paralysis. Every second of uncertainty on a TV is more costly than on a phone, users can't just quickly re-scan; they have to navigate to re-read.

Android TV is a categorically different medium. Users are seated 8–10 feet from the screen, using a directional remote with 4-way navigation. There's no tap, no pinch, no scroll-by-thumb. Every interaction is deliberate.

This meant that design patterns borrowed from SonyLIV's mobile subscription flow, which the team had been working from as a template, were fundamentally wrong for this surface. A 5-tap mobile flow becomes a 15-key-press TV ordeal. Dense comparison tables that feel fine on a phone become walls of text across the room.

My first task was convincing the team that we couldn't iterate on the existing TV flow, we had to start from the TV context and reason upward from there.

After shipping the redesigned subscription funnel, we ran a 14-day A/B test against the original flow with a 50/50 traffic split. The primary goal was upsell CTR, with checkout completion as a guardrail to make sure higher engagement didn't come at the cost of completions.

Variant B (the redesign with the enlarged plan visual) reached statistical significance on day 8 at 95% confidence. Probability to outperform Variant A: 98.2%.

248,613 total impressions. Upsell CTR improved by +46.3%. Upsell-to-cart rate improved by +38.1%. Average order value moved from $168.40 to $184.20, a +9.4% increase. Checkout completion was flat at -0.4%, well within the guardrail threshold. The redesign was recommended for full rollout.

The CTR gap opened from day one and widened steadily. Variant A (compact strip) averaged 5.4% CTR across the 14 days. Variant B (enlarged image) averaged 7.9%. The significance threshold was crossed at day 8 and the gap continued to grow, confirming the result was not noise.

The detailed metrics table confirmed no negative trade-offs: step 3 back-navigation was flat at -0.3 points. Users engaging more with the upsell were not second-guessing their choice at checkout. The visual treatment changed behaviour without introducing doubt.

The plan consolidation decision, removing two of the original five plans, was the right call, but I'd push for it earlier and harder. We spent two weeks designing for five plans before the PM data confirmed that two of them had combined purchase share below 4%. That's two weeks of layout work that never shipped.

I also underestimated how differently Android TV users think about payment. Mobile payment flows assume familiarity with UPI and digital wallets. Our TV audience skewed older, with higher rates of net banking preference, and we found this out halfway through engineering, forcing a late-stage redesign of the payment screen. Earlier research specifically scoped to payment behaviour on TV would have caught it.

Every medium has a cognitive tax. Mobile is high attention, high interaction, users expect to tap quickly and get feedback instantly. TV is low attention, low interaction, users expect to make one considered choice per screen, then lean back. The same information architecture that feels appropriately detailed on mobile feels overwhelming on TV.

The lesson isn't that TV UX needs to be simpler. It's that simplicity means something different depending on the context in which a decision is made. In a darkened living room with a remote, clarity is the product.