Architecture

BBC iPlayer: Architecting for TV

What is your talk about?

For the last 10 years my life has been TV application development, and everyone asked me what is that? They assume it's all native development. But it's just JavaScript, they're just web sites. My talk is more about iPlayer, demystifying that, how we built the front-end, how we scale. It's our engineering journey as we've moved from 14 different codebases just for the iPlayer on TV, we've now got two, how that's worked, how standards have helped us.

What are the frameworks, the tools, the technology you are using?

Unfortunately until very recently TV browsers wouldn't typically manage React mainly for memory reasons but also because of some of the some of the JavaScript functions you'd expect don't exist in all these browsers. We've got a homegrown application framework called TAL which is open source. We just want one codebase. We want to make sure that works on as many devices as possible. Because we're a public service organization, we've got this challenge of universality where when we build an app or when we make things available so the audience it has to be available to the widest range of people possible which means we have to target all the devices on the market not just the ones we'd ideally target. That's a difference from other video on demand providers who can target these particular TVs because they're the easiest to work with, whereas we we've had to target everything. To be fair, TVs today are a lot better than they were 10 years ago so it is slightly different. TVs today are way better than they were 10 years ago, so the challenge isn't quite the same but still we need something that is really a responsive experience for people, that's personalized, that's going to run on every device that we can think of not just the best ones.