The streaming stack you own: VOD and live channels, EPG, multi-DRM, and apps for web, mobile, Smart TV and set-top boxes. 250+ projects since 2005.
A streaming platform is three systems that have to agree. A delivery path that keeps latency and bandwidth cost sane at your audience size. A content pipeline that encodes, protects and schedules what you own. And a client app on every screen your viewers actually have. We build all three, and we build them so that swapping a CDN or a DRM vendor is a config change rather than a rewrite.
Production code on Tizen, Android set-top boxes and WebRTC, deployed by telecoms, broadcasters and venues.
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Janson Media's film library as an iOS app for 100,000 people. Viewers rent single titles on a ticket system, and quality follows the connection instead of stalling. The catalogue is DRM-protected, because the studios behind it require that before they license anything.
View project →Built for DVBLab, a Spanish telecom serving residential and hospitality customers since 2008. Pre-installed on hotel set-top boxes across Spain's Costa Blanca, where a guest checks in and the TV already speaks their language.
Live channels, a program guide and on-demand video, all driven from a standard remote. Built on the Stalker API so it talks to Ministra middleware and the operator's existing subscriber infrastructure instead of replacing it.
“Great work! Attentive to details and excellent communication. Highly recommended.”
OTT platform development means building the four parts a streaming service needs on the open internet. A pipeline that encodes and packages video. A delivery path with a CDN. Protection and access rules, so only paying viewers can play. And client apps on every screen your audience owns. Fora Soft has shipped 250+ such products since 2005.
IPTV is the same product on a managed network. The pieces are the same, the constraints are not: you get guaranteed bandwidth and you inherit a middleware stack and a set-top box you don't control.
Both deliver television over IP. The difference is whose network it crosses, and that decides your cost model, your latency floor and your device list.
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Content goes over the public internet to any device with a connection: phones, tablets, Smart TVs, laptops, browsers. You own the relationship with the viewer and you pay for delivery, which is why CDN cost shows up in the second year as the line item nobody modelled. Netflix, YouTube and Disney+ are OTT.
Content goes over a dedicated network the operator controls, so bandwidth is guaranteed and picture quality is predictable. The price of that is middleware: Ministra, Stalker API, subscriber billing, a set-top box fleet with its own firmware cycle. Telecoms, hotels, hospitals and campuses live here.
Adaptive bitrate over HLS and DASH is the baseline, and low-latency HLS with CMAF chunks brings a live channel down to two seconds or so. Below that you need WebRTC, and the trade is real: sub-second costs more per viewer. We hit 0.4–0.5s for 10,000 concurrent viewers once, on Worldcast Live.
Scheduled playout with a real EPG, so viewers browse a grid instead of a folder. Catch-up and timeshift for the ones who tuned in late. Pre-recorded content played as if it were live, which costs less to deliver than true live and looks better, because compression has time to do its job.
Multi-DRM isn't optional if you license third-party content. Widevine for Android and Chrome, FairPlay for iOS and Safari, PlayReady for Windows and many TVs. AES-128 where you only need to stop casual copying. Device tiers matter more than vendors do, and Widevine L1 versus L3 decides whether you may stream HD at all.
Widevine L1 versus L3 →.avif)
Subscriptions, per-title rentals and purchases, ad-supported tiers, pay-per-view events, and access codes for hotel rooms and campuses. Most platforms that survive run a mix. Server-side ad insertion stitches ads into the stream itself, so blockers don't see them and the picture doesn't stutter at the break.
Web first, because it's the cheapest way to be everywhere. Then native iOS and Android for downloads and push. Then the television: Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, Android TV and Google TV, Apple TV, Fire TV, and operator set-top boxes. Each TV platform is its own store, its own review queue and its own remote-control logic.
Search that tolerates typos on a remote, genre and rating filters, favourites, continue-watching, parental PIN, scheduled release and expiry dates. Recommendations can be editorial or behavioural, and for a library under a few hundred titles editorial usually wins.
Automatic captions and translated subtitles, so a channel opens a second country without a dubbing budget. Quality enhancement that lifts an old catalogue instead of re-shooting it. Moderation for user-generated and live content, which is the one place where a human still has to be reachable in minutes.
Translated subtitles →
Playback failure rate, startup time, rebuffering ratio and cost per delivered hour, broken down by CDN and by device class. Without those four you can't tell a bad encoder from a bad CDN node, and you'll pay for the wrong fix.
Thirty minutes on what you're launching, to whom, and on which screens. We ask the questions that move the budget: content licensing, expected concurrency, and whether anyone has promised a set-top box.
You click through the catalogue, the player and the checkout before a line of production code exists. It's faster to change a screen here than after the Smart TV build.
Architecture, device matrix, DRM plan and delivery path, written down and signed off. This is where the CDN bill gets modelled, not discovered later.
No juniors on your project. We take 1 in 400 applicants and the team that scoped the work is the team that writes it.
Store submissions on every platform you chose, a load test at your target concurrency, and support once the first real audience arrives. You own the code from the first commit.
Uscreen, Muvi, Brightcove and their peers will have you live in weeks, and for a catalogue under a few thousand viewers that's the correct answer. You rent their roadmap and their device list, and you pay per stream or per user, which is cheap until it isn't.
Your own apps and product, someone else's video backend. This is the common middle and it's underrated: it makes sense when what you're selling is the product experience, not the pipeline. Keep the boundary clean and the backend stays replaceable.
Worth it when the numbers at scale stop working, when your device list includes something nobody supports, when an operator's middleware is non-negotiable, or when licensing forces specific DRM and territory rules. It costs more up front. You own the code and the unit economics afterwards.
Every project starts with discovery, design and a clickable prototype, and only then a detailed estimate. The ladder below is where past projects landed across 250+ builds since 2005. What moves it: how many platforms, how much live, and whether studios are involved.
This is the hospitality and telecom starting point.
The fastest way to find out whether people pay.
Multi-DRM, each additional platform, scheduled playout with EPG, server-side ad insertion, recommendations, offline downloads, multi-CDN, and a second language across the interface and the captions. We price them as blocks so you can decide what ships in v1 and what waits.
2 of 8 blocks picked
Multi-DRM
Each additional platform
Scheduled playout with EPG
Server-side ad insertion
Recommendations
Offline downloads
Multi-CDN
A second language across the interface and the captionsFive questions that separate a team that has shipped television from a team that has shipped a video player.
Tell us what you want to launch and who it's for. You get back the scope split into what ships first and what waits, the stack we'd pick with the reasoning, and the questions that decide the budget.
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Inherited a codebase nobody can explain? We read it and tell you three things: what's worth keeping, what fails under real load, and what a security or compliance review would catch.
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Send us how your product works today: what carries the media, where the data lands, and what you've already built. You get back the architecture we'd build instead, what it costs to run at your volume, and which parts you shouldn't build at all.
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It works on your machine and falls apart for real users. We put your product through the conditions that break it — weak networks, more people than the demo had, the session that has to be recorded — and hand you each failure with the place in the stack that caused it.
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How we approach the engineering behind streaming: delivery, packaging, protection and playback.
Named products in production: sub-second concert streaming, an operator set-top box app, a film rental app.
IPTV development and DRM device tiers, the two questions most streaming briefs open with.
Describe the platform, the audience size and the screens it has to run on. We'll come back with an architecture note and a range, and it costs nothing.
You get a realistic estimate, technical recommendations and next steps. Free, no obligations.
