Lead developer on Zong's telecom-native streaming platform: Live TV, VOD, Live Cinema, and major sports events, built for millions.
Integrating 40+ live HLS streams from third-party channel networks, plus high-traffic live sports events like PSL and ICC tournaments, into a seamless experience for a telecom-scale audience. Sports events in particular bring sudden massive concurrent traffic spikes, with thousands of users hitting the platform simultaneously, which is a fundamentally different engineering problem from steady-state live TV.
The platform had to serve four distinct content types under one roof: real-time live TV, scheduled Live Cinema, on-demand VOD, and live sports events, each with different delivery mechanics, third-party integrations, admin workflows, and user experiences. Keeping this unified without the architecture becoming fragile was a core engineering challenge.
With a junior resource handling content uploads, a separate FastAPI developer owning the subscriptions backend, and a mobile app team consuming the same APIs, coordinating across all lanes while maintaining platform stability and being the accountable point of contact for all production issues required both technical depth and ownership beyond a single role.
Integrated provider-supplied HLS stream URLs deployed through internal infrastructure into a reliable video player on the web. Streams load via finalized .m3u8 URLs served through Zong's CDN layer, ensuring consistent delivery across devices.
For PSL coverage, ZongTV had a contract with the Myco streaming platform. I integrated our subscription system with Myco's custom stream URLs: active ZongTV subscribers were granted access to the live match stream while unsubscribed users were blocked at our platform layer. The integration handled concurrent traffic spikes with thousands of simultaneous users during live matches.
For the ICC T20 World Cup live commentary show, I implemented a pragmatic strategy: live streams ran on YouTube, leveraging YouTube's infrastructure, but the embedded stream on ZongTV was placed behind our auth layer, making it exclusive to Zong subscribers and registered users. This dual approach reduced infrastructure load while also serving as a user acquisition channel, driving new registrations through the marketing push around the tournament.
Built a dedicated Live Cinema channel with a day-long movie schedule managed through the admin panel. The content team programs the schedule and the platform handles continuous playback, giving users a linear TV-style cinema experience within a streaming product.
Full VOD pipeline: content stored on Huawei OBS, CDN URL management in MySQL, Blade-based frontend for browsing and playback. Covers Pakistani dramas, telefilms, shows, and multilingual movies.
Laravel-based admin panel enabling the content team to manage live channel listings, VOD uploads, Live Cinema scheduling, sports event configuration, and platform content, keeping a non-technical team fully self-sufficient for day-to-day operations.
Integrated OneSignal to deliver twice-daily push notifications to the user base, keeping engagement active and driving return visits around new content, Live Cinema schedules, and live sports events.
Served as the primary technical point of contact for the mobile app team, ensuring API contracts were clean, consistent, and independently consumable, mirroring the same content and subscription state across web and mobile.
40+ live TV channels streaming reliably across local and international genres.
1M+ monthly views platform-wide across Live TV, VOD, and Live Cinema.
10.4M+ active users on the platform.
Live sports coverage for PSL and ICC tournaments, handling thousands of concurrent users during peak match traffic.
ICC live commentary strategy drove new user registrations through a YouTube-gated acquisition funnel.
Twice-daily push notifications via OneSignal driving consistent return engagement.
Dedicated Live Cinema channel with a fully managed daily movie schedule.
Platform live in production, actively serving Zong's subscriber base on Android, iOS, and web.