Unifying two national streaming platforms on one content & playback stack

The context

CBC and Radio-Canada — Canada’s national broadcasters — ran separate over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms, and parts of the experience (including Gem’s mobile apps) were built by an outside vendor. Two independent stacks plus outsourced pieces meant duplicated effort, higher cost, and slower delivery. The goal: bring it in-house onto one content and playback platform — the systems behind CBC Gem and ICI Tou.tv, serving mobile, web, and console clients from a single set of APIs. Between them, the two platforms reach a national audience — ICI Tou.tv alone reports around 19.5 million monthly views.

What I built

A content management system. The tool editors use to run the catalog — managing lineups and availability windows (the dates a title is licensed to stream) — kept in sync with an upstream system so the catalog is always consistent and rights-correct.

A brand-new catalog API. The service that delivers the movies and shows to every client — mobile, web, and consoles — from one contract, built from scratch and backed by a Redis cache so the hot read paths stay fast at national scale. It integrates with the internal services the experience depends on — ads, SSO, and streaming — and syndicates the catalog to Apple and Google search, so titles are discoverable there too.

A playback API. The personal layer: resume where you left off, favourites, and viewing state — so every user picks up exactly where they stopped, across devices.

Analytics & recommendations. The platform integrates with analytics that feed recommendations, making the experience personal on top of the shared catalog.

Leading the team

I led a cross-organisational back-end team of four. I set the team’s development practices and guidelines, onboarded and mentored members, and performed roughly 80% of code reviews — the connective tissue that keeps a two-org team building the same way. Working with the PO and PM, I broke complex initiatives into achievable pieces and kept platform work, product roadmap, and bug-fixing in one coherent plan.

The outcome

Consolidating onto one stack removed the cost of running two duplicated platforms and improved both performance and delivery — two national services building on one shared foundation instead of maintaining two of everything. For the team, it meant shipping against a single set of contracts — catalog, playback, and content — rather than reconciling two.