API control plane for broadcast file delivery

Challenge

Red Bee Media’s Access Services division prepares subtitle and audio description files for a major UK broadcaster. Delivery ran on file drops and hand-offs between scheduling, media libraries and playout, with no API layer joining them. A playout refresh demanded one controlled route for those files.

Solution

We built the File Delivery Controller: an API-driven, serverless control plane on AWS. Lambda, DynamoDB and SQS hold the workflow and its state, while API Gateway exposes it to operators and monitoring.

Five Go agents wrap Plan Bee, the subtitle library and the audio description compiler so that each legacy system takes part through its existing interface. Terraform builds the infrastructure, and an administration panel, health endpoint and alerts give the operations team the tools to manage it.

Conclusion

The File Delivery Controller gave Red Bee Media queues, shared state and an API between systems previously joined by files and manual hand-offs. The legacy estate ran unchanged while the platform around it became versioned, monitored and reproducible.

We supported the service for three years, then handed it to the in-house team with the documentation to run and extend it themselves.

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