Dave Lucia on Building TV Labs

In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I chat with Dave Lucia, CTO and Co-Founder of TV Labs. Dave returns to the podcast to talk about building an AI-powered smart TV testing platform that lets media companies test streaming apps on hundreds of real physical devices through the cloud — all built primarily in Elixir.

Dave walks through the founding of TV Labs, from meeting his co-founder at Bloomberg over a decade ago to building an MVP with WebRTC during the pandemic. He covers the technical challenges of managing a massive device lab — procurement, warm-up processes, security isolation, session management, and keeping hundreds of TVs, Rokus, Fire TVs, and Apple TVs healthy and available for enterprise clients. The platform uses a custom KQL query engine for real-time device matching and a licensing system built on Elixir GenServers sharded across the cluster.

We get into Dave's 10-year history with Elixir in production, starting at Bloomberg and carrying through to TV Labs. He explains why Elixir was the right fit for orchestrating physical devices at scale, from its standard library minimizing dependencies to building Apple device communication libraries and even a Lua 5.3 interpreter directly in Elixir. Dave also shares how TV Labs uses OpenTelemetry for observability and runs multi-region infrastructure with session recording capabilities.

The conversation shifts to AI, where Dave describes using Claude and other LLMs to accelerate development, automate operations like vendor management and support emails, and build AI agents for QA testing. We wrap up with a candid discussion on whether AI will replace developers and how these tools are fundamentally changing what's possible for small teams.

Connect with Dave:
- Website: https://davelucia.com
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/davydog187
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-lucia-a395441b/

Sponsors:
- BEAMOps: https://beamops.co.uk
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io
- Jido: https://agentjido.xyz/discord

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- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com