Explore Your World

Discovery Channel

The screen saver starts with an old-world map with various locations marked with red Xs.

This screen saver was developed as part of a promotional push to help the Discovery Channel increase its advertising revenue. This included a contest, titled "Explore Your World" aimed at advertising media buyers, with a chance to win a dream vacation to anywhere in the world. The screen saver was part of the media kit package and helped keep both the contest and the Discovery Channel's unique programming at top of mind.

The screen saver starts as an old world map with 10 locations marked on the map with red Xs. A cursor in the shape of a magnifying glass moves around the screen highlighting various locations at random. After highlighting several, the screen saver randomly selects a location and the screen transitions to a colorful scrapbook-like screen with interesting facts and figures about the location and its culture. After a period of time the screen transitions to a screen advertising one of the Discover Channel's signature series, such as "Shark Week", "Mystery Mondays", and "Saturday Safari". Ultimately the screen saver returns to the map screen and starts the random selection sequence again.

Along with this self-running feature, the user can take over the program at any time by using their mouse and selecting a location that they want to explore. To give users even more incentive to use the screen saver, answers to questions in the dream vacation giveaway contest were cleverly included in the facts for each location around the world.