Sky Mexico
A telecommunications operator moving into television, with a fleet of set-top boxes it wanted to carry a richer channel grid — in FHD and 4K.
Stack
- Microservices
- Event-driven architecture
- Distributed systems
- SOA migration
- Streaming · FHD/4K
- System design
Problem
The client was a telecommunications operator moving into television. It already had a fleet of set-top boxes in customers' homes, and it wanted them to do more: a faster, richer channel grid, and live television in FHD and 4K. The platform behind them was a hybrid of on-premises and cloud systems on an aging service-oriented architecture — a decade of coupling where adding a capability meant touching a shared bus, and touching the bus meant touching everything. It could not carry a modern television experience to that many concurrent viewers, and the set-top boxes already in the field could not simply be swapped out.
Approach
This was a consultancy and pre-sales engagement: what I delivered was an assessment and a design, not a running platform. I ran discovery sessions and architecture workshops with engineering and with the business, because the legacy encoded rules nobody had written down. From that I produced the target architecture — a migration from the SOA to event-driven microservices, sized for millions of concurrent users — a phased roadmap, and the diagrams and documentation to present it. The whole design worked backward from the constraint that mattered: whatever we proposed had to run behind the set-top boxes already installed, not an ideal fleet.
The tradeoff
The clean answer was a greenfield platform designed for the television experience the business wanted. The honest answer was a platform shaped by the set-top boxes already in living rooms — hardware you cannot replace on a roadmap's schedule. Designing for the installed fleet meant accepting the ceiling of what those boxes could decode and render, and staging the FHD and 4K ambition to match it. A prettier architecture that ignored the fleet would have been a demo, not a plan the client could actually ship.
Impact
Full assessment, target architecture, and migration roadmap delivered — consultancy and pre-sales
- Full platform assessment delivered for a telecom-to-television move — architecture, delivery lifecycle, and the business rules buried in the legacy
- Target architecture designed — SOA to event-driven microservices, sized for millions of concurrent users
- Modernization sequenced as a phased migration around the installed set-top-box fleet, toward an FHD and 4K channel grid
- Discovery sessions and architecture workshops run with engineering and executive stakeholders
- Architecture diagrams, migration roadmap, and documentation produced and presented — a consultancy and pre-sales deliverable; I did not go on to build the platform
What I learned
The deliverable was a decision, not a system — this was pre-sales, and what I handed over was the assessment and the design, not a deployment. What I would carry anywhere is the discipline of designing for the fleet you already have. The most elegant architecture is worthless if it assumes hardware the customer still has to buy. The set-top boxes already in homes were the real specification, and reading them honestly was most of the job.