Instill Video (Otter)
An OTT streaming platform, codenamed Otter and later named Instill Video. I built the original prototype and launched both the platform and its first customer, The Pilates Class.
- BPM
- 174
- GRADE
- B
- LEVEL
- 7
- RELEASES
- 26
- YEARS
- 2020–2023
The Codename Was Otter
Two days before Christmas 2020, work started on otter-ui. Otter was the codename for what became Instill Video, an over the top streaming platform. I like the name history: back in 2016 the studio had a project called Instill for video knowledge sharing inside teams, and four years later the name came back on something much bigger.
The UI came first, in Next.js, and I was a contributor on that one. The backend followed in February 2021 and that one was mine from the start. Then a small certs project in April. OTT covers a lot: ingest, transcoding, catalogs, entitlements and playback. I built the original prototype, and the first thing we launched on it was The Pilates Class, a subscription video service built on the platform.
I didn't know that December how long it would run. By September 2021 there was a second generation codebase called anotter, and that took up two years.
The UI Reaches 1.6
On January 11, 2022 the UI got tagged v1.6. The interface moved slowly compared to the backend.
Otter was a year old by then, and anotter had started the previous September and was taking most of my attention. So v1.6 was about keeping the older codebase working, not pushing it forward: fix what viewers ran into, and don't refactor anything that didn't need it.
I was a contributor on otter-ui, not its author. Around this tag there was plenty else going on: Tacoboutbot in November, Kersplat's site going up in December, and my old FriendBot domain finally going dark in February. Six weeks after v1.6 the backend tagged v1.21.
Shipping Every Two Weeks
The backend hit v1.21 on February 23rd, 2022. I'd been shipping it about every two weeks since it started in February 2021, on a service I wrote from scratch.
A streaming backend always has more to do. Encoding profiles change, devices change, the catalogue grows, entitlements get a new tier, and each of those is a release. Shipping that often meant I worked to keep the release process simple, so a deploy wasn't a big event.
By then its successor, anotter, was five months old and would run until late 2023, so this was near the end of Otter's run. It was also the same year as the hackathons.
history
- v1.21
- v1.6