21 June 2013

HBO Developed Apple TV Application Entirely In-House

The Apple TV received a major update recently that brough ESPN, HBO Go and more to the box. After its release Wednesday, HBO's chief technology officer, Otto Berkes, shed some light on why it took so long for HBO to get its content on the Apple TV.

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Berkes states one of the main reasons it took so long because it was HBO's first time entirely creating an app with their software and design staff. Usually HBO teams up with third parties to help create and release the applications.

Nothing is more time consuming than writing all the code involved and encoding HBO's massive video library, said Otto Berkes, HBO's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with The Verge. He said “optimizing the compression formula to deliver the high-quality video to the lowest bandwidth” is a massive undertaking.

Getting HBO Go on the Apple TV might have taken longer had HBO not begun to boost the number of engineers working at the company's new development center in Seattle. Apple TV was the first app that HBO created completely in-house, said Berkes, a former Microsoft executive who started at HBO two years ago. Prior to Apple TV, HBO teamed with third parties on its apps, but “this was 100 percent created by our software and design staff,” Berkes said.


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