I recently started working for Simplestream creating their next generation Connected TV apps. Simplestream provide OTT solutions for just about every Connected TV or Set Top Box device you can think of – including a turnkey solution for ingest, encoding and management of monetisation models.

What I do

Creating OTT apps for HbbTV / Smart TV and Set Top Box devices, using JavaScript / TypeScript / BBC TAL / React / Preact. Responsible for developing and maintaining the Hybrid TV product, coordinating software releases, balancing requests across over a dozen clients, coordinating with QA, optimising UX, ensuring a stable and performant UI from a single code base across hundreds of big screen devices from Freeview, Freely, Freesat, Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, YouView, Hisense VIDAA, TiVo, Liberty Global Horizon, etc.

For a bit of fun, you can (virtually) see me coding up the app here.

I also played with using Next.js for Server-Side-Rendering (in that example app, you’ll notice there are no calls to API endpoints from the frontend, like magic). But ultimately, a nicely optimised frontend experience can still yield the best performance to cost ratio.