Foxtel Australia
For four years, Foxtel's channel marketers had a standing answer to "who builds the website?": Chillybin. Around 30 microsites across Channel [V], the History Channel, Foxtel Movies and more, each themed to its show and shipped to a broadcast deadline.
Around 30 channel and show websites designed and built for Foxtel between roughly 2012 and 2016, on a shared responsive template that made every new site faster than the last.
What we were solving
Foxtel ran dozens of channels, and every one of them had a marketing calendar. A show moving from weekly to six nights a week. A festival lineup announcement. An annual voting campaign. Each moment needed a website, the website needed to look like the show, and the deadline was set by the broadcast schedule, not the web team.
When Foxtel first came to Chillybin, many of its programme pages were old, dated and disconnected from what was on air. Buying each new site as a one-off agency project would have been slow and expensive, and it would have produced 30 sites that looked like they came from 30 different agencies.
Foxtel needed a production partner: a team that knew the brand, could quote a job in days, build it in weeks, and hand the keys to the channel's own staff. Success looked like a steady stream of sites that landed on time for every premiere.
How we tackled it
One template, thirty faces
Early on we designed and built a shared responsive Foxtel template: one WordPress foundation reused across the channel sites. A theming system let Foxtel assign a colour to each show, which flowed through the links, titles and sub-pages belonging to it. The template is why the engagement scaled. Arena's site was quoted as a small job because it was built "using existing templates", and by 2015 Foxtel's project sheet ran to a rolling queue of channel builds scheduled months out, each cheaper and faster because of the system underneath.
Built for broadcast deadlines
The relationship ran like a production line, with a shared job tracker owned by Foxtel's digital team: job title, estimate, approval, deadline, status. Every deadline was a fixed date tied to a launch or rebrand. When Channel [V] took The Riff from weekly to six days a week, the site we built gave the team a day-by-day schedule homepage and a video slider they could update themselves. CMC Rocks and The People Speak ran on the Genesis Framework so channel staff could manage content without coming back to us.
Beyond brochureware
Plenty of these were launch microsites, but the interesting ones were applications. The [V] Oz Artist of the Year site was a custom voting build with an admin layer for managing knockout rounds. Foxtel Movies was a dynamic movie guide fed by XML imports of movies, actors and screening data, so the site stayed current without anyone re-keying listings. Foxtel Arts got an event guide built on the Eventfinda API.
What we delivered
Foxtel's microsite problem now has an answer in the record: around 30 properties shipped to broadcast dates over four years. The portfolio spanned twelve Channel [V] and music channel properties, five History Channel show sites, and over a dozen channel sites from A&E and Arena through Showcase, SoHo and Foxtel Movies.
Every one shipped on a system that kept Foxtel's branding consistent while giving each show its own identity. The engagement wound down around 2016, which is the natural lifespan of this kind of work: the sites were built for moments, and they served them.
What we learned
Repeat work is won on the second job, not the first. What kept Foxtel coming back for four years was the compounding value of the template: every job made the next one cheaper to quote and faster to build.
Small jobs deserve grown-up process. A form-styling task and a full channel build sat in the same shared tracker. That discipline is what let a small Singapore studio act as the ongoing web arm of a national broadcaster without anything falling through the cracks.
Impact & outcomes
million+ votes from 22,000+ voters in one Oz Artist of the Year campaign
You’ve been a pleasure to work with and you made this WordPress migration project possible. It’s been a huge success for Foxtel.
