The Project

No longer content with living to the schedules of broadcast media, the digital teens of today demand control over their content like never before. MTV Under The Thumb redefines television for the mobile generations, changing how they see and share their favourite shows wherever they are.

When out and about, the best MTV shows ? past and present ? can be streamed onto mobile devices, on demand for the first time. When at home the app becomes a remote control, taking over any PC, laptop or connected TV for an immersive dual-screen experience. MTV is best enjoyed with friends, and the invention of co-viewing allows multiple apps to sync their viewing, letting users watch shows together in real time, anytime, anywhere.

The Technology

The iOS and Android apps were built using their respective native platforms. The streaming service provided by MTV and supported by a realtime chat service to facilitate the synchronisation and chat features.

My Work

I developed the Flash video player to work on desktop browsers and webTV. I also worked on testing and integrating the chat service to manage the synchronisation of each participants video streams. I worked in both flash and android, to test the video synchronisation across devices.

I additionally wrote a test framework to determine how well the synchronisation service would work at scale. This test package involved scripts to spin up and configure several thousand aws instances running the chat software, simulating varying concurrent synchronisation requests. The software measured various factors and reported them to a dashboard.