Antena: video app for TV, phone and computer.

The context

The video apps available for playing a personal list of channels, movies and series on TV were slow, confusing with a remote control and stalled during playback. The idea was to build an app from scratch, with the experience of the big streaming services, that works the same on the living room TV, the phone and the computer.

The goal

One app with the same account on every device: what you start on the TV continues on the phone, favorites show up everywhere, and playback stays stable even on unstable connections, without a computer serving the video.

What was built

• Streaming interface in React: home with highlights, category rows, movies, series with seasons and episodes, live channels with a program guide and a daily events agenda.
• Kotlin playback engine inside the Android app: parallel chunked downloads, sliding-window cache, next episode prepared before the current one ends and automatic fallback when a source fails.
• TV mode designed for the remote: spatial navigation between cards, always-visible focus, back button that moves up one level and voice search.
• Sync across devices: progress, favorites and list order stored in the account and updated in real time between TV, phone and computer.
• Cast to TV via Chromecast and DLNA, with playback control from the phone.
• Windows app with an installer, plus new-version push notifications on Android.

How it was done

The project moved through 42 documented phases, each validated by measurement: scrolling frame rate, real download speed, time to first frame and screen-by-screen navigation with the TV remote. The visual direction, called Marquise, uses a warm charcoal background with amber accents so the posters are the brightest element on screen.

About the images

Antena plays lists that users subscribe to themselves. In the images of this case study, posters, titles and category names are blurred: the focus here is the interface and the engineering of the app, not the content.