watch with papa
project brief
Barebone Collective reached out to us to build the backend of a web application for Amazon Prime Video’s 2026 Father’s Day campaign ‘Watch with Papa’.
The web app helped kids schedule the one thing dads really want - time together.
On the app, you can:
- Pick a favourite show or movie on Prime Video
- Choose a date and time to watch it with your father
- Generate a personalised ticket
- Send it to your father
It also had the following add-on fun activities:
- Popcorn making responsibility
- Permission for unlimited dad jokes
- A 15-minute post-watch discussion
The frontend was designed by Barebones Collective and developed with Loveable. Our task was to add the functionality layer and build a robust backend to handle the expected traffic during the campaign. While the application was a standalone system, the features like booking tickets, add-ons and generating the personalized ticket mimicked the theatre booking experience everyone is used to. So, we had to ensure the backend was built to support the frontend experience at all times. And given the audience base of Amazon Prime Video, we had to optimize the backend to cater them all.
One of the challenges was ensuring the application worked without storing any user data. The brief stated users should be able to access and generate tickets without having to create an account or sign in to the application. Since the application lets users book more than one ticket, listing all tickets was a ‘must-have’ feature. Without having a database to associate users to their activity within the app was a challenge. We found a way around the no-database policy by storing the ticket booking information on the users’ local storage which ensured they found all tickets they booked when they accessed the application from the same browser.
We finished the project in 5 days, including multiple cups of coffee and rounds of tweaking and testing the backend to ensure Prime video subscribers loved the experience as much as we and our pals at Barebones Collective did.
All and all, it was a fun experience for us. And for us, it was the first exposure to adding a backend to an AI generated frontend.
