The Digital Concert Hall

The Berliner Philharmoniker is ranked one of the top orchestras in the world. Their Digital Concert Hall is a pioneer of its kind, streaming premium, original content to subscribers—on practically any device–since 2008. We worked closely with the team to solve the difficult problem of user experience consistency across a constantly changing tech environment, maintainability and team inclusion.

As a streaming service with original, high-quality content and a passionate following around the world, it's no wonder the Digital Concert Hall has been a hit from day one. But the device landscape has shifted several times since 2008, and as the number of clients multiplied, problems began to surface.

Without a centralized design team, the interface was recreated for each new client, with different user flows, creating a dissonant experience for users—and a difficult task for the BPH team.

1. Meet the diverse and constantly evolving requirements of each platform, while maintaining a consistent feel and recognizable brand.
2. Simplify and unify app components and user flows, leaving room to leverage each platform's strengths.
3. Work swiftly within a small, startup-like structure and help create better product design processes.
4. Understand our users, their realities, desires and needs and deliver an experience that feels as premium as the content.
5. Prioritize accessibility and inclusion.

For the launch of the tvOS app store, we got to rebuild the app from the ground up. We worked closely with our Smart TV team as well as Apple and delivered an experience that delighted users, as well as stakeholders, collecting an "App of the Year (Japan)" award.

With full client approval, we moved on to the next question: how to port this successful experience to all other platforms?

The answer was a platform-agnostic design system. This not only facilitated the design of new clients, but also streamlined communication with developers.

Next up was the crown jewel of the Digital Concert Hall, the web app which was where it all started in 2008. In that time the app had remained fairly unchanged. With that redesign complete we would have overhauled the entire product suite of the Digital Concert Hall with apps on almost every single platform: web, iOS & Android (both mobile and tablet), Smart TV, tvOS and Windows desktop).

• Redesign of web app, launched in 2022
• Focus on user-centered design and accessibility
• Through metrics, realized we needed to simplify and optimize the subscription model
• Implemented more actionable metrics
• Creating the foundation for a more data-driven roadmap

The Berliner Philharmoniker's Digital Concert Hall continues to thrive and continues to evolve and expand to new platforms with the design system we created as the foundation.

Enjoy and experience it for yourself at digitalconcerthall.com.