Archives nobody can search
Years of video, audio and articles with thin or inconsistent metadata, so good material is hard to find, reuse or license.
Media, entertainment & gaming
AI & Software Development for UK Media & Entertainment
We help publishers, broadcasters, production companies, creators, event businesses and gaming studios build the platforms behind their content — streaming, subscriptions, ticketing and community — and use AI for slow jobs like tagging, captioning and clipping, with editors in charge.
- Gaming and social app projects
- Captions and accessibility designed in
- Editors approve AI tags and moderation
Industry challenges
What slows media teams down.
Audiences move quickly and budgets rarely do. The pressure lands on small teams doing manual work that software could take on.
Where software earns its keep
- Searchable archives with AI-suggested metadata
- Draft captions and transcripts for every upload
- Subscription flows with clear renewals and easy cancellation
- Moderation queues that put the riskiest items first
Captions and subtitles by hand
Captioning is slow when it starts from scratch, yet audiences expect it everywhere — and many broadcasters have Ofcom access service targets to meet.
Subscriptions that leak
Failed renewals, awkward paywalls, app store billing rules and cancellation friction lose subscribers, and consumer law expects renewals to be clear and cancelling to be straightforward.
Moderation that cannot keep up
Comments, uploads, chat and messages all need reviewing, and if people can share content on your service, the Online Safety Act adds duties on risk assessment, reporting and response.
Rights tracked in spreadsheets
Licence windows, territories, platforms and contributor terms sit in spreadsheets, so content goes live where it should not — or stays offline when it could be earning.
Traffic that arrives all at once
Breaking news, a big release or a ticket on-sale brings peaks that slow pages, stall video or break checkout at exactly the wrong moment.
Solutions
What we build for media and entertainment.
Platforms for audiences and the tools behind them — from a subscription video service to a moderation queue — built for traffic peaks and designed with accessibility from the start.
Streaming and video platforms
Upload, transcoding, HLS delivery through a CDN, players with caption and audio description tracks, and live streaming where you need it.
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Subscriptions and paywalls
Metered and hard paywalls, registration walls, trials, gifting and renewals through Stripe, with app store billing handled where your apps need it.
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Content, rights and metadata systems
Headless CMS setups and asset libraries that track rights windows, territories, contributors and versions alongside the content itself.
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Trust and safety tooling
Reporting flows, review queues, user sanctions, appeals and audit logs — the tooling your team needs to act on its Online Safety Act duties.
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Ticketing and event platforms
Seat maps, timed entry, virtual queues for busy on-sales, e-tickets with QR codes and scanning apps for the door team.
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Community, fan and gaming apps
Accounts, profiles, chat, leaderboards and companion apps for games, shows and creators, on web and mobile.
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AI use cases
AI that takes the slow jobs off your editors.
Tagging, transcribing, clipping and first-pass moderation — suggested by AI, decided by people, and logged so you can see what changed and why.
Metadata tagging
Suggest topics, people, places and objects for video, images and articles, so archive search works and editors approve tags in bulk instead of typing them.
Transcription and captioning
Draft transcripts and timed captions with speaker labels for every upload, ready for a subtitler to correct rather than starting from a blank file.
Moderation support
Score comments, uploads and chat for likely harm, send the riskiest items to moderators first and record every decision. People decide; the model sorts the queue.
Recommendations
Suggest the next article, episode or event from viewing history and content similarity, with editorial rules so recommendations do not bury what your editors want seen.
Highlight and clip suggestions
Find likely highlights from transcripts, audio and scene changes, and cut draft vertical clips for an editor to trim, caption and publish.
Sponsored post checks
Check sponsored posts against the brand brief and flag any that seem to be missing a clear ad label — which the ASA expects on influencer marketing — for a person to review.
Technology & integration
Technology built for audiences and peaks.
We build on well-established delivery patterns — adaptive streaming, CDNs, queues — and integrate the specialist services you already pay for, such as DRM, ad servers or consent platforms, through their APIs.
Video and audio
HLS adaptive streamingTranscoding pipelines on AWSCDN deliveryWebRTC for low-latency live
Subscriptions and payments
Stripe BillingPaywall and metering rulesApp store subscriptionsEntitlements across devices
Ads, consent and analytics
Consent management platformsIAB TCF for programmatic adsAd server integrationPrivacy-friendly analytics
Content and metadata
Headless CMS or WordPressRights and availability windowsSearch and vector searchWebVTT and SRT subtitles
Applications
Next.js and ReactReact Native and FlutterNode.js and GoPostgreSQL and Redis
AI
Speech-to-text modelsImage and video classificationEmbeddings for recommendationsLLMs with guardrails and review
Security & data
How we protect audiences, data and content.
Media platforms hold subscriber details, viewing history, payments and, often, content posted by the public. These are our defaults when we build them.
Permissions by role
Editors, moderators, finance and support staff each get the permissions their role needs, with single sign-on and multi-factor authentication for admin tools.
Consent before tracking
Advertising and analytics cookies wait for consent where PECR requires it, and each viewer’s choices are recorded and easy to change.
Moderation with an audit trail
Every report, decision, appeal and sanction is logged, so you can show how your service handles harmful content and user complaints.
Care with younger audiences
Age assurance, safer defaults and restricted features can be built in where your children’s access assessment says under-18s are likely to use the service.
Protecting paid content
Signed URLs, token-based access and DRM through your chosen provider help keep paid content behind the paywall, with keys held in a secrets manager.
Editors decide, not models
AI tags, captions, clips and moderation scores are suggestions; editors and moderators approve them, and the model’s part in each decision is recorded.
We are a software development company, not a regulator, law firm or trust and safety consultancy. Your Online Safety Act, PECR, accessibility and advertising obligations remain yours. We build to the requirements your legal and compliance teams set, provide the technical evidence they ask for, and sign-off stays with your organisation.
Relevant work
Products we have designed and built.
Related projects from our case studies: a competitive gaming platform with wallet handling, and a social discovery app for events and meet-ups with real-time chat.
All case studiesGaming · Blockchain
StakeClash
Skill-based competitive gaming platform with wallet handling and smart-contract payouts.
Next.jsSolidityNode.jsPostgreSQL
Read the case studySocial · Mobile
Pademi
Social discovery app for events, meet-ups and friend introductions.
React NativeNode.jsSocket.ioPostgreSQL
Read the case studyHow we work
How we build media platforms that hold up on launch day.
Seven stages, the same on every project. The length of each one changes with the work; skipping one never saves time for long.
- 01
Discovery
We map the content lifecycle — commissioning, rights, production, publishing and monetisation — alongside your audience, revenue model and the duties that apply, such as the Online Safety Act or accessibility rules.
Content lifecycle and obligations map
- 02
Strategy
We agree what to build first and what to leave out, pick the engagement model, and set milestones with a budget range in pounds.
Scoped first release and estimate
- 03
UX & architecture
Players, paywalls and sign-up flows are prototyped and tested on real devices, including TVs and screen readers where they matter, with captions and controls designed for accessibility from the start.
Accessible, device-tested prototype
- 04
Development
Two-week sprints with a demo at the end of each, code review on every change, and a staging environment your team can use.
Working software every sprint
- 05
Testing
We load-test for your biggest expected moment — a premiere, an on-sale, a breaking story — and test playback across devices, networks and caption formats.
Load and playback test results
- 06
Launch
Launches are staged behind feature flags with a rollback plan, and we watch the dashboards with you through the first big release.
Staged launch with live monitoring
- 07
Optimisation & support
After launch we fix, measure and improve — a support retainer, a roadmap of next features, or a clean handover to your own team.
Support plan or handover
FAQs
Questions we get asked.
Straight answers on scope, cost, timelines and how we work. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
Can you build a subscription video or streaming platform?
Yes: upload and transcoding, HLS delivery through a CDN, players on web and mobile, subscriptions and entitlements, and live streaming where needed. We use managed cloud media services where they save cost and effort, and integrate a DRM provider if your content licences require one.
Does the Online Safety Act apply to our platform?
If users can share content with each other or send messages, it probably does, and Ofcom’s codes set out what is expected. Whether and how it applies is a question for your legal team; we build what they decide you need — reporting tools, moderation queues, age assurance, audit logs and transparency data.
How accurate are AI captions and transcripts?
Accurate enough to save a lot of typing, not accurate enough to publish unchecked — names, jargon, accents and overlapping speech still trip models up. We build captioning as a draft-and-review workflow, so a person corrects and approves every file before it goes live.
Can AI moderation replace our moderators?
No, and we would not build it that way. Models are useful for sorting a queue, catching obvious spam and flagging likely harm quickly; people make the decisions, especially where context matters. Every automated action is logged and can be appealed.
How do you handle cookie consent and advertising?
We integrate a consent management platform so advertising and non-essential analytics wait for consent where PECR requires it, and pass consent signals to ad partners through the IAB framework if you use programmatic advertising. If you are considering a “consent or pay” model, the ICO has published guidance your legal team should review first.
Can you handle traffic spikes for launches and on-sales?
We design for them: caching and CDNs for pages and video, queues for checkout, virtual waiting rooms for big on-sales, and load tests that simulate your expected peak before the day. Cloud capacity scales up for the event and back down afterwards, so you are not paying for peak all year.
Do you work with gaming studios?
Yes, on the platform around the game rather than the game engine itself: player accounts, payments, leaderboards, community and companion apps, live-ops dashboards and moderation for in-game chat. If players can message each other, Online Safety Act duties may apply there too.
How much does a media platform cost to build?
It depends on video volume, apps, payments and integrations. A discovery sprint from £2,000 produces a scoped plan and estimate, and the build is fixed price with milestone billing. For ongoing product work, a managed team starts from £9,500 a month, or dedicated developers from £2,900 a month.
Start a project
Planning a media, streaming or gaming project?
Tell us about your audience, your content and how you make money from it. An engineer will reply within one working day with questions, risks to plan for and a realistic first step.
What happens next
- 1A senior engineer reads your brief within one working day, and replies with questions or a first view.
- 2A 30-minute call to understand the goal, constraints and what good looks like — no sales script.
- 3A written proposal with scope, milestones, team and a GBP estimate you can take to your board.
Techsleight Labs is a trading name of Krapton IT Consultancy.
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