Case study / Australian Broadcasting Corporation
ABC: FAST channels, Hottest 100 scale and enterprise search
At the ABC I worked on the platform engineering behind how the national broadcaster ships media: automating FAST channel production, architecture for high-traffic live events like the Triple J Hottest 100, and enterprise search across the digital estate.
- Role
- Technical Lead & Sr DevOps
- Timeline
- 2017 — 2025
- Org
- ABC
- Focus
- Media platforms
FAST channel automation
ABC's manual process for launching FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming TV) channels was slow and resource-intensive — sourcing media, scheduling, transcoding, assembly and publication were all human-driven.
I worked on an automated, event-driven workflow on AWS covering the pipeline end to end, which cut channel launch from a month-scale manual process to something far faster and supported ABC's entry into the FAST market. [VERIFY: exact launch-time figures and channel names before publishing them]
- Media sourcing
- Scheduling
- Event-driven pipelineAWS
- Transcode
- Assembly
- Publication
- Live FAST channel
Live events — engineering for the spike
The Triple J Hottest 100 is one of the larger annual traffic events in Australian media, and broadcast-era infrastructure wasn't built for its spikes. I worked on resilient AWS architecture for high-concurrency live events — dynamic scaling driven by real-time demand rather than pre-provisioned guesses — a pattern reused for later live moments.
Enterprise search
Search across ABC's digital properties limited discovery of a very large archive. I spearheaded the procurement and implementation lifecycle for Algolia — R&D, vendor evaluation, building the implementation team, then scaling it across sites.
What carried forward
Everything I now build at Powerhouse — event-driven pipelines, platform contracts over point-to-point integrations, infrastructure that scales to the moment — was pressure-tested here at national-broadcaster scale.