Taking on a live streaming platform — and making it safe to change.
Local Footy Hub was already live, already complex, and already relied on by its audience when CNAB took over running it. No rebuild — this is operational and engineering ownership of an inherited platform, brought under control and steadily improved while the cameras kept rolling.
What we took on
CNAB inherited a large, already-live sports streaming and community platform — handed over mid-flight from a previous technical team.
This was not a greenfield project. Local Footy Hub was a working, audience-facing platform with games to deliver every week — and CNAB took on operational and coordination ownership of all of it, in production, from day one.
The estate was broad: a central backend, several production frontends, a service layer between them, and a live video pipelinecarrying many remote cameras through third-party production, hosting, and stats processing. Several moving systems, multiple outside parties, one live service that couldn't go dark.
A multi-application estate spanning several systems and outside parties — live before we arrived.
The challenge we set out to solve
A platform this size is only as safe as it is understood— and much of how it worked wasn't written down anywhere.
Taking on a mature live system means inheriting its unknowns. Critical knowledge lived largely in people's heads, dependencies between the moving parts weren't documented, and the video stack reached across several third-party providers — each a link in delivering a live game.
The work sat squarely between hands-on technical execution and stakeholder coordination: aligning developers, translating technical reality into plain terms for the client, and making sound tactical calls under live conditions. The first job wasn't to change the platform — it was to genuinely understand it, and reduce the concentration risk we'd taken on.
Held informally
How the platform really worked lived mostly in people's heads — not in any shared, durable record.
Largely undocumented
The links between backend, frontends, and services weren't mapped — so the blast radius of any change was unclear.
Spread across providers
Live delivery depended on several outside parties in sequence — concentration risk we set out to reduce.
What CNAB did
Make it understood, make it documented, make it safe to operate — then prove it under live pressure.
Mapped the entire system
Built a working map of the whole platform — inter-product dependencies, deployment paths, and the points where things could fail — so the system could be reasoned about as a whole rather than guessed at piece by piece.
Turned tribal knowledge into a record
Captured what had only lived in people's heads as structured, durable documentation — so the platform no longer depends on any one person being available to keep running.
Established disciplined operating practices
Put the habits in place that make change safe on a live platform.
Resolved a live production incident end-to-end
When a complex issue hit the live platform, CNAB worked it through to resolution — a frontend rollback alongside an API redeploy — without losing the service.
Where it's heading
Ownership that looks forward — CNAB is now leading the platform's next step, not just holding it steady.
A migration to modern cloud video infrastructure
CNAB is leading a migration of the video infrastructure toward a modern cloud architecture — aligning three separate technical groups around a single plan, and reworking the dependent tooling underneath so the platform moves forward as one coordinated system.
A successful takeover isn't a single heroic fix — it's turning an opaque, fragile system into one that's understood, documented, and safe to change.
CNAB Digital — on taking ownership of inherited platforms
What this demonstrates
A distinct capability: taking on a sprawling production system and making it safe to own.
Ownership of complex inherited systems
Taking on a large, live platform built by others — and making it genuinely ours to operate and evolve.
Platform operations & reliability
Keeping a live, audience-facing service running while change happens underneath it — safely, deliberately.
Technical documentation & de-risking
Converting tribal knowledge into durable records, and reducing the concentration risk in a fragile estate.
Multi-party technical coordination
Aligning developers, providers, and the client — and translating technical reality between them.
Live video & streaming infrastructure
Operating a real-time video pipeline across multiple providers, from capture to delivery to stats.
Migration leadership
Steering a cloud migration across separate teams toward one direction — forward-looking, not just steady-state.