IMG produces and distributes international coverage of the English Premier League through Premier League Productions, feeding live match output and original programming to broadcast partners around the world. To let league leadership follow that output as it aired, IMG ran a web portal with a live video player. It worked, provided you were sitting at a desk.
Executives were not sitting at desks. IMG had issued iPads across its leadership group, and the portal would not run on them. The video player was built on Flash, which Apple did not support on iOS. The portal was also limited to live feeds only, so anything missed was simply missed.
Net Solutions rebuilt the experience as a hybrid application that ran on iPad and the web without replacing the underlying video infrastructure. We wrapped an HLS-capable player in a PhoneGap and Cordova container to get around the Flash constraint, added a video-on-demand library beside the live feeds, built a background service that ingested broadcast schedules automatically, and layered category-level access controls over exclusive content. The application authenticated against IMG’s existing credential directory and shipped through Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program rather than the public App Store, so it reached issued devices only.
The build ran to a hard external deadline: the start of the football season.
IMG’s portal had been built for a single scenario: an executive at a desktop machine, watching a match as it happened. Every assumption behind it started to fail as leadership moved onto tablets and asked for more than the live feed.
The portal’s video playback depended on a Flash-based Livestream player. Apple did not support Flash on iOS, so the entire viewing experience was unavailable on the devices IMG had already put in executives’ hands. We assessed ThirdPresence as a replacement, but it was web-only and could not carry the mobile requirement.
Playback was restricted to real-time feeds. A missed match, a piece of specialty programming, or an internal production could not be retrieved afterwards. There was no archive and no mechanism for publishing one.
Users had no interactive schedule. There was no way to look ahead across a day or a week, filter by programming category, or plan viewing around a fixture list that changes constantly.
Some content was commercially sensitive or restricted to particular tiers of the organisation. The portal had no way to expose one category to one group and hide it from another. This became pressing when IMG decided to widen access beyond the original executive group.
Discussion about a broadcast happened over email and phone, disconnected from the asset it referred to. Nothing tied a comment to the feed that prompted it.
The platform had to be in executives’ hands before the season opened. That fixed the delivery window and ruled out any approach that required rebuilding IMG’s video infrastructure.
We treated the video infrastructure as fixed and solved the problem at the delivery layer instead. IMG’s streaming setup worked; what failed was the player technology and the assumption of a desktop browser. Decoupling the front end from the backend let us extend the platform to iPad inside the season deadline, without an infrastructure programme IMG had neither budgeted for nor had time to run.
The sequence was straightforward. Assess the playback options, wrap the application in a hybrid container, move schedule ingestion into a background service, federate identity with IMG’s existing directory, and distribute privately to issued devices.
Four principles held throughout:
The platform shipped as six connected pieces. A hybrid application that reached iPad without touching the streaming backend, an on-demand library sitting beside the live feeds, a schedule pipeline that maintained itself, and the access controls, messaging, and distribution model that kept exclusive content with the people entitled to see it.
We built a single application layer serving iPad and web, packaged in a PhoneGap and Cordova container and tuned for iPad display so it read as native rather than as a wrapped web page.
The video engine was extended to serve archived assets alongside live match feeds, turning a broadcast viewer into a content platform.
Programming schedules arrived as XML files. Rather than have anyone key them in, we built a pipeline that consumed them on its own.
When IMG widened access beyond the original group, content permissions became a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
Discussion moved into the platform, next to the content it concerned.
The application was in executives’ hands before the season opened, and stayed in service long enough to earn a second round of enhancements shaped by how it was actually being used. Five things changed for IMG.
Premier League executives could follow live match output from the iPads IMG had already issued them, wherever they were, using credentials they already had.
What began as a real-time feed grew into a content portal combining live broadcasts, an archived library, interactive scheduling, and in-context discussion.
Category-level permissions let IMG open access to a wider group without giving that group access to everything.
Automated XML ingestion removed manual schedule entry and kept programming data current without operational overhead.
Adapting the delivery layer rather than rebuilding the video backend kept the project inside a deadline set by the fixture list.
The obvious response to a Flash dependency in 2012 was a streaming replatform. We found the route that met the deadline instead.
Private distribution, federated identity, and content governance are different problems from App Store publishing, and we build for them.
The relationship with IMG spanned multiple products and platforms, with second-year enhancements shaped by how executives actually used the application.
We have delivered across live production, rights, licensing, and event platforms for organisations operating at league and federation scale.
We replaced the playback layer rather than the streaming infrastructure. The application was packaged in a PhoneGap and Cordova hybrid container using HLS for video delivery, which iOS supports natively. That removed the Flash dependency at the client without requiring IMG to rebuild its backend video setup, which mattered because the deadline was the start of the football season.
A hybrid application runs web technologies inside a native container, so one codebase serves multiple platforms while still accessing device capabilities. For IMG it was the fastest route to iPad. It let us reuse the existing web application logic, ship inside a fixed season deadline, and keep a single platform serving both iPad and desktop users.
Through Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program, which allows an organisation to distribute internally built applications directly to its own devices. IMG had issued iPads to its leadership group, and the application was installed only on those devices. It was never publicly listed, searchable, or downloadable, which suited content with commercial sensitivity.
Automatically, through a background service. Programming schedules arrived as XML files, and a dedicated Windows service monitored those files, detected changes, parsed the data, and wrote it into SQL Server. Because ingestion ran independently of the user-facing application, schedule updates never interfered with live viewing. Users saw daily, weekly, and monthly views with category filtering.
Through category-level Access Control Lists with administrative override. Permissions were applied to content categories rather than individual assets, so IMG could grant one executive tier access to a category while withholding it from another. This became important when IMG decided to widen access beyond the original leadership group.
No. The application authenticated against IMG’s central web credential management system through secure web services, so the same credentials and the same session governance applied on both surfaces. There was no separate mobile user directory to maintain.
Yes. Alongside live match feeds, the platform included a video-on-demand library where administrators could upload, tag, and publish archived matches and IMG-produced specialty programming. The original portal had been live-only, so this was a significant part of the brief.
.NET and SQL Server on the server side, PhoneGap and Cordova for the hybrid mobile container, and Backbone.js with HTML, CSS, and jQuery on the front end. Video delivery used HLS and integrated with IMG’s existing Livestream infrastructure. A Windows background service handled XML schedule ingestion.
It was assessed and ruled out because it was web-only. The core requirement was iPad delivery, and a web-only player could not meet it, which is what led to the hybrid container approach.
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