Music-Broadcast Platform Modernization
Modernizing a live multi-site music-broadcast platform — mobile API, admin panel, cross-platform app redesign, and an owned analytics stack
What is Music-Broadcast Platform Modernization?
An ongoing modernization engagement for a multi-site, scheduled music-broadcast platform — a desktop player and remotely-controlled stations driven by a calendar-based scheduler. The original backend was a mature but aging Java stack: reliable, but built before today's mobile clients and modern admin tooling existed. The engagement spans a mobile-ready JSON API, a new admin panel, a cross-platform app redesign, and a self-hosted analytics platform to replace a third-party SaaS. Client unnamed by agreement.
What problem did Music-Broadcast Platform Modernization solve?
Modernize without disruption: bring a mobile-first control layer, a modern admin experience, and a redesigned app to a live system while preserving every behaviour that stations and legacy clients depend on. Nothing could break for the users already relying on it — high-risk surfaces like authentication, device-control protocols, and production schema changes all needed to land on a running platform.
How Music-Broadcast Platform Modernization works
Shipped a complete JSON API with full feature parity against the legacy control protocol — station status, playback queue, playlists, scheduling, command lifecycle, and event feeds — delivered in disciplined phases (scaffold → read → write), JWT-secured with a hardened login flow, and documented through a versioned importable API collection. Alongside it: a Spring Boot 3 + React 18 admin panel replacing the legacy staff tool, artwork management surfaced through the API, and continuous deployment to Azure validated against production-equivalent data. The whole engagement runs AI-native with humans in the loop: AI accelerates design, implementation and analysis, while a human reviews and signs off at every gate — nothing ships unsupervised. The core modernization is delivered and in production: a live broadcast platform now controllable by modern mobile clients without rewriting the systems its stations depend on, and a modern admin experience for the operations team. A ground-up cross-platform app redesign (SwiftUI on iOS, Kotlin on Android, one shared design-token system) is rolling out with its foundation shipped on both platforms, and a self-hosted TimescaleDB analytics platform to replace the third-party SaaS is in the design-and-build phase — stated as design work, not a shipped product.
Case Study in Depth
Delivered: a mobile-ready API on a legacy-critical system
The platform's stations and desktop players speak a legacy control protocol that could not change. The new JSON API was built beside it with full feature parity — station status, playback queue, playlists, weekly and yearly scheduling, command lifecycle, and event feeds — so mobile clients gained first-class control without touching the backend the stations still use. Authentication moved to station-scoped JWT with credentials taken out of URL parameters into a secure request body, and every phase was validated against a production-equivalent database before release.
The API ships with a versioned, importable collection (v1 → v2 → v3) so the client's team and integrators always have accurate, runnable documentation — a deliberate deliverable, not an afterthought, because an API that only its author can call is not finished.
AI-native development, humans in the loop
Every part of the engagement is built in an AI-native development environment: AI accelerates design, implementation and analysis, and a human reviews, refines and signs off at every meaningful gate — design, security, and go-live. High-risk changes such as authentication, device-control protocols, and production schema are explicitly gated behind human sign-off; nothing ships to production unsupervised. Secrets stay out of source control and infrastructure is provisioned only from official, verified sources. This is what makes it possible to move fast on a live, legacy-critical system without breaking it.
Delivered
Core modernization in production
The JSON API with full legacy parity, JWT security, and versioned documentation; a Spring Boot 3 + React 18 admin panel replacing the legacy staff tool; artwork management; continuous deployment to Azure validated against production-equivalent data.
In progress
Cross-platform app redesign rolling out
The platform's mobile apps are being redesigned from the ground up — from a dark, tab-limited legacy UI to a modern, artwork-rich experience built from a shared Figma design system. iOS is native SwiftUI and Android native Kotlin, both driven by a single design-token system mirrored one-to-one across platforms so the two apps stay consistent with the design and with each other. The redesigned foundation — design tokens, navigation shell, a persistent mini-player, re-skinned entry screens — has landed on both platforms, wrapped around the existing proven functionality so nothing regresses during the transition. The redesigned content screens are in build.
Not yet done
Owned analytics platform in design
The platform's usage analytics historically depended on a third-party SaaS. Its replacement — currently in the architecture and infrastructure phase, presented as design work rather than a shipped product — is a self-hosted analytics stack the client fully owns: action logs flowing into a self-managed TimescaleDB store chosen for high-volume append-heavy event data, isolated from the operational database so heavy reporting never competes with day-to-day operations, and surfaced through dashboards inside the admin panel the team already uses. The reports are the ones operators actually ask for: most-played playlists, song removals and trends, most-skipped tracks, manual-versus-scheduled overrides, player uptime, and content-update monitoring — with no per-seat SaaS pricing and full data ownership.
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