Telenet Yelo

Telenet Yelo brought live TV and on-demand to the iPhone and iPad — your channels and a catalogue to watch on the device, with AirPlay to hand any of it off to the television. I worked on the iOS apps at icapps, for Telenet. Underneath sat one C library, shared across every platform; the iOS apps themselves were Objective-C.

TV without the box

Live TV meant streaming protected broadcast channels and moving between them quickly, with a guide to see what was on. On-demand added a catalogue you could start on the phone and come back to later. And when the small screen was the wrong one, AirPlay handed the stream to an Apple TV: the phone turned into the remote, and the video moved to the television with your place intact.

A shared C core

The logic that makes TV work — the back-end conversations, the entitlements, the channel guide, the playback session — lived in a C library shared across the apps, not rewritten for each platform. My side was the iOS half: wrapping that C in idiomatic Objective-C and UIKit, and keeping the bridge between the two honest about memory and threading. The payoff was consistency, with the same code deciding the same things no matter whose phone it ran on.

Why it stuck

Live TV is unforgiving in a quiet way. A stream that stalls, or a channel that takes a beat too long to appear, is something people notice at once — they're used to a decoder that simply works. Most of the effort went into making the app feel that instant, on a phone, running on a core it shared with everyone else.