In 2012 the system that got video into iPlayer was a monolith. In the nine months between Jan 2013 and Sept 2013 we replaced it with a new system we called Video Factory. It uses a microservices architecture and runs in AWS.

Video Factory has allowed us to more than double the amount of video available in iPlayer, extend availability from 7 days to 30 days and increase the amount of HD content by more than 700%. It also allows us to scale for sudden spikes in video going into iPlayer during events like Glastonbury and Wimbledon.

At the same time it has allowed us to move to a continuous delivery model and our developers can now deploy a component to live in under 15 minutes and perform dozens of live deployments every week.

In 2014 we started serving simulcast content (on-line versions of our TV channels) from Video Factory and during 2015 we moved radio content into this new system. For the first time unifying the BBC's systems for handling Audio and Video content online. We also added support for Podcasts, Audio and Video Clip Publishing, BBC Store and S4C. Recently we completely updated Video Factory to enable MPEG-DASH and add better support for HLS. This allows BBC iPlayer to make audio and video playable in modern browsers and Android devices without the need for Flash or Air.

In this talk Stephen Godwin describes how the BBC integrated its broadcast systems with AWS, how Video Factory is built around a microservices architecture that uses both REST and SQS and how this has allowed new features to be added and large changes to be made without interruption to the normal operation of iPlayer.