Join us at BBC Quay House in Salford Quays, Greater Manchester on Wednesday 24th January, from 3pm for an afternoon of talks on developing applications for smart TVs, set-top boxes, streamers, and games consoles.

Doors will open at 3pm and the talks will kick off at 3.15pm. Some of us will also be heading to Kargo (https://kargomkt.com/) after the talks (around 5pm), to continue the conversations.

RSVP is open! Sign up now if you'd like to join. Please bring ID with you to the event. In person attendees must be over 18.

This meetup is kindly sponsored by BBC iPlayer & BBC Sounds.

We're expecting this event to be quite popular, so please ensure you're able to join us, before RSVPing.

Further information on getting to MediaCity can be found at https://www.mediacityuk.co.uk/visit-us/

You can find out more about our meetups, including our Code of Conduct, on the BBC website - https://bit.ly/bbc-tech-meetup

We will be live streaming this event on our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@BBCTechMeetup

The live stream will start at 3.15pm on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1PM93h2FHU

Agenda:

15:15 – 15:20 – Welcome

15:20 – 15:45 – Revolutionising CTV: The Power of Automation (Martin Tyler & Taha Ibrahim, FX Digital) Device fragmentation in the CTV space poses a distinct challenge, necessitating broader platform support than traditional web and mobile spaces. Users often keep their devices for long periods, leading to a vast array of models requiring testing. Most companies can't afford large QA teams to test regularly enough, making automation testing crucial. Many automation testing solutions are available, however what is regularly overlooked is the difficulty transitioning from merely having an automation system to achieving comprehensive device and feature automation coverage. This challenge is compounded during ongoing projects with many features and automated test cases. Successfully navigating this terrain can revolutionise CTV development. This talk will explore FX Digital's shift from mainly manual testing to integrating automation across all devices and projects daily. We'll discuss strategies for managing and expanding device roster, constantly scaling systems, optimising pipelines, gaining DevOps skills, keeping stakeholders informed, and addressing CTV-specific features.

15:45 - 16:10 - How to pirate your own content (Ethan Mills & Wendi Fan, Softwire) In order to support new content formats & preview thumbnails, we needed access to the original VoD content masters; however, we only had access to encrypted, and fragmented, Microsoft Smooth Streaming content. We developed a custom tool, based on the Dash.js codebase, to recompose and decrypt the MSS content; then, we built the new content processing pipelines based on AWS technologies, PlayReady DRM encryption, and ffmpeg, and we implemented front-end support for the technology. In this talk, we'll discuss the challenges of this approach, and what we learned along the way.

16:10 – 16:35 – Networking and refreshments (break)

16:35 – 17:00 – Monoliths to micro front-ends: there and back again (Ryan Waudby, BBC) Embark on a swift exploration of the BBC's over-a-decade-long journey in TV application development, unravelling challenges, inventive solutions, and ongoing endeavours to tame the fractious TV browser landscape. This talk will cover the various iterations and milestones of front-end development across the BBC TV platform over the past years, some projects aiding teams to diverge and discover while others were converging the platform to share successes across the whole estate. It will be given at a high level and leans for more breadth rather than depth, hopefully sparking conversations afterwards.