As a companion piece to the summary of the CBS News video-related projects for web to which I contributed, this is a study of an EPG-like feature for the CBS News iOS app.

CBS News has a wide variety of FAST channels, and a longstanding wish of the product and editorial teams is a fully-featured EPG for web and apps. Earlier in my time at CBS News, I had worked a great deal on such a feature for its OTT apps, so when I was assigned to work on such feature specifically for iOS, I was aware of many of the pitfalls and complications.

Below is a selection of some of the many exploratory mocks. At this point, you may note that the livestreams were still branded as "CBSN", and that many are simply channel switchers that superficially resemble EPGs:

During this project, the streaming product "CBSN" was rebranded as "CBS News". The product team wanted the iOS app EPG to look and work like parent company Paramount's successful product Pluto. The below mockups are my first two attempts to replicate Pluto's look and feel:

We struggled a great deal with the limitations of the data feed, which did not include "shows" as such. The below mocks are a single concept, shown in iOS compact and regular views (portrait and landscape). It displays all "shows" as equally-sized cells, because it did not seem to be possible to display them on an hourly timeline.

The red "live" playhead was not truly accurate, but was still a desired feature. The middle content was all tappable, but everything in the past and future was informational only. To reiterate, technical restrictions kept steering us back towards a glorified channel switcher.

The next two sets of mocks show the same concept, in its first-load state, and then horizontally scrolled into the future. This version is back to the Pluto concept, where the "shows" are displayed on an hour-based grid, and the selected livestream is focused.

In development, it proved impossible to replicate the Pluto model of the channel logo having a focus state, while still being able to horizontally swipe through the timeline, so the below iteration illustrates that only individual cells could be focused.

As was the case in all concepts, anything in the future or past was informational only. The result was a feature that superficially resembled an EPG, but the only real functionality was presenting the currently-playing "show" on numerous livestreams, and an approximation of what would be coming up in the future, roughly on at the time it might roll over. Adding features to tap on future cells and set alerts was discussed, but not pursued.

The feature has long since been removed from the app, so I can't confirm, but I'm pretty sure this close to what shipped. It remained a feature in the app for some time, before being replaced by a more simple channel switcher.