EXPlay, the platform on demand of Canal Extremadura

2026 is a year marked in red in the history of Canal Extremadura, because it officially saw the birth of EXPlay, our OTT platform for on-demand content.

A modern, functional platform that brings together Canal Extremadura’s television and radio broadcasts, its programmes and its entire archive: more than 24,000 published pieces of content, available across all major operating systems, both mobile and Smart TV.

The project was born from a tender process that I led in 2024, just two weeks after joining the Digital Media management team, and it was the first tender I had ever had to draft. A complex project to design on paper, but an incredibly exciting and challenging one.

The challenge

An OTT platform has many moving parts, and that is the part you do not see from the outside: you have to decide how the front end will look, how content will be managed, which OVP will deliver it and where everything will be stored. And all of this has to be decided on paper, before anything actually exists, while also calculating how much each component will cost over the lifetime of the contract.

On top of that was what I wanted our platform to offer as a differentiating factor compared with other OTT services. We included two features in the tender specifications that, in 2024, were still uncommon among regional public-service media platforms:

• The ability to create FAST channels directly from the content in the CMS, without needing a separate editorial team dedicated to feeding them.
• The ability to launch interactive features on top of the content, opening the door to revenue streams that we had never had before.

Eight companies submitted bids. Plenitas won the tender in partnership with Telefónica, which also operates the OTT platforms for Canal Sur, Barça One, A Galega and, after ours, the platform for the Canary Islands public broadcaster.

What we did

Building the platform proved considerably more difficult than drafting the tender. We had to set up the live television and radio streams, migrate the entire archive, categorise everything from scratch using a taxonomy capable of supporting future growth and, above all, design the ingestion system, which was by far the most difficult part of the entire project.

That is the key to making the whole thing work. Today, content enters the platform through four different workflows, depending on what it is:

• Live.
• On demand.
• Live event broadcast.
• Radio podcast.

A news bulletin, a football match or a radio programme becomes available on demand just a few minutes after its linear broadcast ends, without anyone having to upload it manually. Compared with the catch-up system we had before, the difference is enormous.

Once the platform was ready, we rolled it out across all front ends in beta mode, starting with Android TV and continuing with the mobile platforms, before securing approval on Samsung and LG, still under the Canal Extremadura brand. On 27 April 2026, with the launch of the organisation’s new visual identity, it adopted its definitive brand: EXPlay.

Where we are today

EXPlay is available on Samsung, LG, TitanOS, Vidaa, iOS, Android, Android TV, web, HbbTV, Fire TV Stick, Roku and Apple TV. It has 8,650 registered users and three FAST channels currently operating: one dedicated to bullfighting, one for children and another focused on Extremadura.

None of this would have been possible without the patience and tremendous amount of work put in by a team that believed in the project from the very beginning and made the platform their own: Luis Raúl Granjo, leading the graphic side of the project; Arturo Chaves, the platform’s best beta tester and an endless source of ideas; Javier Moralo, managing the ingestion and categorisation of our huge content catalogue; Francisco Reyes, mapping out all the ingestion workflows... alongside many other colleagues who worked tirelessly to turn this platform into a reality.

There is still plenty of work ahead, but we have already achieved milestones normally associated with much larger platforms, such as becoming part of the self-hosting programmes on LG and Samsung. This means that updates to our platform can now reach users immediately, without having to go through lengthy verification processes.

The future of media lies in making on-demand consumption easier... and with EXPlay, Canal Extremadura is already at the forefront of the audiovisual media industry in Spain.