← work — the registryENG-024sealed — file open
UK entertainment channel
a broadcast platform and a prize engine — public, under load
A channel with a six-figure subscriber base wanted its own home: a streaming platform for web and Fire TV, and a re-skinnable prediction-and-prize engine that never goes cold. It went public in September.
- sector
- UK entertainment channel · streaming platform + prize engine
- period
- jun – sep 2026 — ongoing
- role
- engineer of record — platform, engine, apps, operations
readouts — measured, sourced
04 on the record · every one names its source
1,000
platform subscribers in the first four hours
read from — platform database
14 min
launch-day database outage, 17:45 – 17:59
read from — health endpoint + restart record
22,720
arcade rounds in one day
read from — platform database
4,563
prize-engine members
read from — engine database
the file — read in order
01
the brief
Free to enter, always — a prize competition, not gambling. Watch-to-play codes hidden in the videos. Provably-fair draws with published seeds, because there is no live draw. Two winners per event: a skill leaderboard and a luck draw. Own accounts, own data, embeddable in the existing site.
02
the engineering
A web platform plus a Fire TV app with code pairing; an outbox delivering tens of thousands of notifications a day; hourly sweeps that close abandoned rounds; a health endpoint the operator can read.
A help page that is a tested source of truth — every fact on it pinned by a test, extended whenever a feature ships.
03
the hard part
Launch day: a thousand platform subscribers in four hours. At 17:45 the entry-tier database fell over under the load and every dynamic page timed out; a management-API restart had it back at 17:59, then dedicated cores. The hot-fix throttled live polling so the storm could not repeat.
Fire TV viewers said their code had nowhere to go — the pairing screen never named the place. Six vanity routes and a help section fixed what no feature could.
provenance
- surfaces touched
- web platform · Fire TV app · prize engine · notification outbox · database tier
- numbers read from
- platform and engine databases · health endpoint · hosting management API
- tags
- platform build · fire tv · prize engine · incident
identity sealed — the sector is on record; the name publishes only with the client's written approval. every readout above was read at source.
the registry
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the same hands
The person who diagnosed this file is the person who ships the fix. Two plain sentences beat a brief.