Building EXPlay: from paper to the most important content platform in Extremadura

The tender for a streaming platform forces you to settle, in a single document and before anything exists, the infrastructure, the content model and what all of it will cost over the years that follow. We wrote the Canal Extremadura one in 2024, two weeks after I joined the digital media directorship, and it was the first tender I had ever led.

Settling it all on paper

A video-on-demand platform has a lot of moving parts: the front-end design, the content management, the OVP that serves it, the storage. You have to commit it to paper while the product does not exist, while nobody has seen any of it working and while the newsroom cannot tell you what it will need a year from now, and on top of that you have to put a figure on each of those pieces for the whole life of the contract.

Once it is awarded, that document becomes the playing field. For years.

The two features we asked for beyond the obvious

In 2024 hardly any regional broadcaster had them in its tender. The first, building FAST channels straight from the CMS, with no separate newsroom dedicated to feeding them. The second, running interactive layers over the content, which open the door to revenue streams we did not have back then. Both are still standing and both were worth it.

Eight companies bid. The winner was Plenitas, partnered with Telefónica, who also run the streaming platforms of Canal Sur, Barça One, A Galega and, after us, the Canary Islands broadcaster.

The ingest is where it is won

What decides whether a platform lives or dies appears in the tender in small print. It sits in the ingest: the pipe carrying content from the moment it goes out on air to the moment somebody can watch it on demand from the sofa.

That is where we racked our brains for months. We had to stand up the television and radio live feeds, migrate the whole archive, categorise it from scratch and automate publication. Content now comes in through four different routes depending on what it is, and a news bulletin, a sports broadcast or a podcast is available a few minutes after going out on air. That sentence takes ten seconds to read and cost the best part of a year.

The order of priorities

If I had to divide up the time on a tender today, the better half would go to the workflow. The shop window can be rebuilt whenever you like, with a redesign and a few weeks of work, but the pipe that fills it is far harder to touch and it shapes the rest of the contract.

We asked a good number of people, inside and outside the building, and even so we have spent a year and a half correcting things we took for granted in that document. We will carry on, because that is what happens when you write about something before you have seen it work.