Dazzler: the BBC channel platform behind the EastEnders omnibus on iPlayer

The challenge

Reliance Jio, one of India’s largest mobile networks, offered the BBC a channel on its platform. In India, a huge share of TV is watched on phones, so the BBC needed a mobile-first channel — and there was no system for it. Content lived in a legacy archive. It started as a twelve-month proof of concept, with editorial teams in London and Delhi.

What we built

• Dazzler, a scheduling app in React and React Native for editorial teams: plan programmes today, tomorrow or two months out; save drafts, work in a scratchpad, upload schedules, and see what’s playing right now.
• Safety nets built in: if a slot is ever empty, the channel falls back to backup content or an interstitial — it never goes dark.
• Live events and breaking news: editors can drop in a live feed that switches the channel to an outside BBC source over RTMP.
• A playout engine on AWS MediaLive: a scheduler fetches each programme from the BBC’s archive, chunks it with FFmpeg and plays the schedule out as one continuous live RTMP stream.

The outcome

The proof of concept became production. The platform was taken up for the BritBox USA pilot, and today it runs on BBC iPlayer — it’s what plays the EastEnders omnibus.