PlaySports

Play Sports is Telenet's sports-streaming service — live football and other sport, with replays and highlights, watchable on your own devices rather than only through the TV. A Play Sports app already existed; the job was to rewrite it. icapps rebuilt the native Apple-platform apps on the same codebase first created for YUGO, Telenet's streaming-TV app — a foundation we had made reusable so a second product could be built on it.

Sport, live and on demand

On Play Sports a customer watches live matches as they happen, then comes back for the replay or the highlights afterwards, across iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Sport behaves unlike most streaming. Everyone arrives at once, for kickoff, and a live goal can't land on one screen noticeably later than on the next. So the app had to hold up under that — live and on-demand playback that stayed smooth in the minute a match pulled the whole audience in together.

The YUGO foundation, made reusable

This is the part that made Play Sports interesting to build. YUGO had been designed around a dynamic, configurable front-end — an architecture meant from the start to carry more than one product. With Play Sports we put that idea to the test: we generalised the YUGO codebase into a reusable foundation and rewrote Play Sports on top of it. Two different Telenet apps, one for streaming entertainment and the other for sport, ended up sharing the same core — the players, the navigation, the configurable screens — with each app's own identity and content layered over it.

The challenge

The hard part was twofold. First, the shared foundation had to be truly shared: general enough to serve both an entertainment app and a sports app without either one bending it out of shape, and clean enough that work on one didn't quietly break the other. Second, sport made its own demands — reliable live playback at scale, and content organised around live events and competitions rather than a catalogue browsed at leisure, all while keeping the same native feel across touch on iPhone and iPad and the remote and focus engine on Apple TV. Rewriting an existing app added a further constraint: matching what customers already relied on while moving the whole thing onto the new base.

My role

As Lead iOS Developer at icapps, I worked on the Apple-platform apps for Play Sports, including making the YUGO codebase reusable and the rewrite on top of it.

Outcome

Play Sports moved onto a modern native base shared with YUGO, giving Telenet two streaming products on one foundation — less duplicated work between them, and a consistent way to keep both growing. For me it was the clearest proof of the YUGO architecture: a system designed to carry more than one app, doing exactly that.