Smart TV Testing Made Simple with Dave Lucia of TV Labs

Platform Engineering Podcast

Testing smart TV applications presents unique challenges that traditional web testing approaches can't solve. Dave Lucia, CTO and co-founder of TV Labs, shares how his team built a platform that virtualizes televisions and set-top boxes to help media companies test their smart TV apps on physical devices.

Learn about TV Labs' innovative architecture and how they handle everything from camera-based testing systems to their custom Lua-based DSL for faster test execution. A key highlight is how choosing Elixir as their primary technology has enabled TV Labs to build a robust orchestration system. The language's built-in capabilities for fault tolerance, process isolation, and distributed computing make it particularly well-suited for managing concurrent connections and real-time state across multiple devices.

The discussion also explores practical insights about system architecture, including how TV Labs leverages Phoenix presence for real-time device state tracking and achieves microsecond-level performance for message broadcasting.

Guest: Dave Lucia, CTO & Co-Founder at TV Labs

Dave is a technology leader with deep experience designing and scaling systems across industries including media, sports betting, finance, and developer tooling. He is a prominent member of the BEAM community, regularly speaking at conferences such as Code BEAM SF, ElixirConf, The Big Elixir, and RabbitMQ Summit.

Dave Lucia, Website

Dave Lucia, X

Dave Lucia. Bluesky

TV Labs

TV Labs, LinkedIn

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Appium
• “The Road to 2 Million Websocket Connections in Phoenix”
• “From $erverless to Elixir”
• eBPF