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How Vega enabled Zattoo to streamline TV app development
Zattoo, one of the leading European TV-as-a-service providers, reduced development cycles for some features from months to roughly a week by unifying TV app development on a shared React Native foundation powered by Vega.
Zattoo delivers live TV, on-demand content, and features like replay and recording. Serving both direct-to-consumer audiences and telecommunications providers through white-label offerings (where partners can brand Zattoo’s technology as their own), Zattoo operates across a wide range of devices, including smart TVs, mobile devices, and web browsers.
As its device footprint expanded, Zattoo set out to unify development across TV operating systems while maintaining a consistent, high-quality user experience.
Zattoo’s TV applications were historically built using OS-specific native codebases. Each major operating system required its own implementation, tooling, and development workflows. While this approach enabled broad device coverage, it introduced growing complexity as the TV app evolved and made it more difficult to consistently address performance across multiple code bases.
Multiple teams worked independently across these operating systems, increasing coordination overhead and resulting in inconsistencies in viewer experience. Features had to be implemented multiple times, slowing delivery and making it difficult to maintain parity across devices. As a result, even routine updates required significant cross-team coordination — and as Zattoo's roadmap accelerated, the need for a more scalable development model became urgent.
With coordination overhead growing and feature parity becoming harder to maintain, Zattoo began evaluating alternatives to its OS-specific development model. The team explored several approaches to cross-experience development, including web-based runtimes and other multi-experience frameworks. While these options showed promise, they introduced tradeoffs around performance, system integration, and long-term scalability for TV-focused user experiences.
Zattoo had already begun investing in a move toward a unified React Native architecture. When Amazon introduced Vega, a React Native-based system optimized for building TV experiences — it aligned with and accelerated the direction the team was already pursuing. During the transition to Vega, Zattoo intentionally separated the React Native migration from major design or UX changes. This allowed the team to validate the new technical foundation without introducing additional variables. As a result, the unified TV app launched with only minor UX adjustments alongside the underlying technology shift.
The collaboration with Amazon's engineering team was a key factor in maintaining momentum throughout the migration. The Amazon Vega engineering team provided hands-on support throughout the transition, helping Zattoo adopt a shared monorepo architecture, enabling required React Native libraries, and addressing performance considerations. This support helped accelerate Zattoo’s progress toward unifying code across TV experiences. By adopting Vega alongside Android TV within a shared monorepo, Zattoo could consolidate development without fragmenting teams across multiple technologies.
With the architectural direction set, Zattoo moved into execution. The team began by building a proof of concept to validate that a single React Native codebase could power multiple TV operating systems. Using early documentation, sample projects, and direct collaboration with the Amazon team, developers were able to get an initial Vega application running within days, followed by a broader multi-experience prototype within a few sprints.
The team adopted a monorepo architecture that shared business logic, UI components, and tooling across TV operating systems. OS-specific differences such as playback integrations or in-app purchase handling were isolated into modular components, minimizing duplication while preserving flexibility.
Previously, feature delivery required coordinating planning and prioritization across independent OS teams for the web and two separate third-party OSes, each operating on its own timeline. With the unified React Native architecture, most roadmap items are now planned and delivered within self-contained value stream teams, reducing cross-team dependencies and simplifying sprint planning. To put this in perspective: where a feature like the program details view previously required separate implementations for each OS — each with its own QA cycle — a single implementation now runs on both Vega and Android TV without any OS-specific modifications. In some workflows, this unified approach reduced development cycles from months to roughly a week.
Rather than expanding headcount significantly, Zattoo focused on retraining existing engineers. Over several months, teams transitioned from OS-specific silos to feature-focused groups responsible for end-to-end functionality. As Q1 2026 marks Zattoo’s first full quarter with two TV operating systems running on React Native, the team plans to track delivery velocity improvements throughout the year.
“Vega was a game-changing accelerator that enabled cross-platform consistency at the right time. It helped us achieve roughly 95% consistency in the TV user experience while simplifying how our teams build and ship features.”
— Pavel Verkhovskyi, Head of Engineering, Zattoo
By unifying TV app development around Vega, Zattoo transformed how features are built, tested, and delivered across different devices, enabling more consistent experiences and improving both coordination and development velocity. Since launch, core stability metrics, including crash rates, playback quality scores, and overall app usage patterns, have remained consistent or improved over benchmarks from previous native applications.
- Build once, maintain once: the power of a unified codebase
A single code base eliminated the need to implement, test, and maintain the same feature across multiple OS-specific codebases. Instead of duplicating effort, teams now design and ship a feature once — and it runs across devices. This made consistency achievable at scale and freed up engineering capacity for new functionality rather than maintenance. - Restructuring teams to unlock velocity
Shifting away from OS-specific teams allowed Zattoo to adopt a “one team, one problem” approach. Under the previous OS-centric model, engineers needed broad knowledge of the entire application, which increased cognitive load and made it difficult to develop deep expertise in any single area. - With feature-focused value stream teams, engineers can now concentrate on specific domains, such as Content Pages or the playback experience, giving teams clearer ownership and enabling faster, more confident decision-making.
- TV-optimized performance with Vega
For complex TV user interfaces, Vega provided the performant UI components and animation capabilities needed to deliver rich experiences while maintaining cross-device consistency. - Hands-on support and community engagement
Throughout the transition, Zattoo relied on Amazon’s developer documentation, community forums, and direct support to navigate challenges and validate architectural decisions. Community forums served as a primary channel for issue discovery and peer learning, while regular touchpoints with the Amazon team helped unblock progress and guide architectural decisions during the migration.
“Throughout the transition, the quality and responsiveness of Amazon’s support exceeded our expectations. The documentation, community forums, and regular touchpoints made it easier to work through challenges and move forward with confidence.”
— Bogdan Plieshka, Principal Frontend Engineer, Zattoo
With the foundation in place, Zattoo is now focused on extending these gains across its full device portfolio. Following the launch of its unified TV application, Zattoo plans to continue expanding feature parity across TV operating systems while monitoring customer feedback and refining the experience. The team is also investing in cross-OS testing infrastructure to extend its unified approach beyond development and into quality assurance.
Each TV operating system added to the unified codebase compounds the efficiency gains — less duplication, faster delivery, and more engineering capacity directed toward innovation rather than maintenance.
As Zattoo continues migrating its TV app portfolio to a single React Native foundation, Vega remains a core component of its long-term strategy for scaling TV experiences across devices.
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