Work
What we have built, and for whom
Private broadcasters in Germany and Austria, a platform operator, and a satellite services company. Two of these are written up in full.
Clients
Case studies
Written up in full
Breadth
Bibel TV — one code base, four runtimes
Mediathek with real search, EPG, four livestreams and VAST advertising, running on HbbTV, Tizen, webOS and Android TV from a single React codebase.
Read it →Scale
ProSiebenSat.1 — seven channel brands, one platform
Mediathek, themed channels, EPG, competitions, Switch-In advertising and format landing pages, on one headless platform.
Read it →HD+
The operator app — a different contract entirely
We co-built the HbbTV operator application for the HD+ platform. It is the piece of work on this page that is least like the others, and the one that says most about what we do.
An operator app is not a channel's app
A broadcaster's HbbTV application is launched by the broadcast stream, lives inside that channel, and disappears when the viewer tunes away. An operator application belongs to the platform. It is launched by the operator, it runs privileged, and it is present across channels rather than inside one.
That changes almost every assumption. The application has to coexist with the broadcasters' own applications and yield to them at the right moments — an operator app that sits on top of a broadcaster's red-button experience is a commercial problem, not just a technical one. Its lifecycle is controlled by the platform, which can start and stop it in ways an ordinary HbbTV application is never subjected to. And it has to behave across the whole fleet of certified receivers rather than on the sets one broadcaster happens to care about.
Why it is worth saying
Operator applications are written with the platform operator, against their certification process, on their release calendar. There are not many teams in this market who have been on that side of the table, and it is a different kind of trust than an editorial project.
Notably, our own emulator does not emulate operator apps — it says so plainly on its own page. Building them and pretending a desktop tool can stand in for them are different things.
SES
SES Platform Services
Platform services work, and the line back to where this started: team members here built their first HbbTV applications for SES Astra in 2008 — before the specification looked the way it does now, and before most of the industry had an opinion about it.
Tell us what you are building.
Christian answers these himself, usually within a working day.