SBS has revamped its digital home and unveiled the most significant redesign to its homepage in more than a decade.
Underpinned by a new platform, the new site better serves the needs of Australia’s growing multilingual audiences, delivering breaking news, information, and compelling stories in a seamless user experience.
The new SBS.com.au, launched this week, strengthens the reach and discoverability of the distinctive content for which SBS is renowned. The curated site showcases the network’s unrivalled film, TV, news, audio, food and sport offering, with logical, user-friendly pathways to industry-leading streaming service, SBS On Demand, and its 15,000+ hours of content.
Made possible by a major technical overhaul, the site’s redesign offers a first-rate user experience, featuring a scalable and mobile-friendly interface that makes it easier than ever to consume great content, navigate across the network’s platforms, and more quickly access relevant news and information, public service messaging, and compelling content about the sports, shows and movies they most enjoy.
Darren Farnham, SBS’s chief technology officer, said the new site had been in development for some time. He said: “This redesign is the culmination of a huge amount of work and follows a series of technology upgrades and serious backend innovations we’re implementing across our digital properties.
“These enable a better user experience with features like personalised content recommendations based on users’ preferred language that the site can detect automatically,” he said.
“Publishing in dozens of different scripts presents unique challenges from a content management system perspective, and this project has been years in the making.
“More improvements are coming soon, including improved search functionality that will make it simpler and quicker to find what you’re looking for across our network.”
Sarah Yassien, SBS’s director of strategy, said the new homepage reflects both SBS’s response to audiences’ changing consumption habits well as its broader audience-led strategy.
“It’s not just about great content and a frictionless user journey across our sites. As audiences rapidly shift to online consumption, we’re right there with them, with SBS On Demand at the heart of our digital presence and our in-language news and newly relaunched SBS Audio offering now more accessible than ever,” she said.
“These innovations make our offering even more compelling and are reflective of SBS’s commitment to serving a truly contemporary Australian community through audio, video and text in just about any language our audience speaks.”
Key features of the new homepage and SBS’s other digital properties enabled by the update include:
• Content recommendations based on automatically detected language preferences;
• A news shelf presenting SBS’s journalism in more than 60 languages;
• Ability quickly switch between English and professionally translated news articles in multiple languages;
• Easier access to live radio channels and SBS On Demand linear streams;
• A new What’s On destination that enables audiences to delve deeper into the movies and shows they enjoy, or discover new favourites through interviews, explainers, and recommendations from the SBS On Demand curation team;
• A new Explore SBS section, drawing in the most recent content from across the network;
• Improved global navigation across the SBS network.