I recently started working for Simplestream creating their next generation TV UIs. Simplestream provide TV 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, 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.