After working on this project on and off for the past year year we finally helped launch the public beta of SyncTV. SyncTV allows you to purchase as well as subscribe to TV content. The subscriptions are for channels or shows that you want to watch unlike cable, which forces you to get a whole lineup of channels you don't even care about.
The technology of SyncTV:
SyncTV was built using the fastest growing web development framework, Ruby on Rails. SyncTV talks via web services to a Java digital rights management (DRM) server developed by Intertrust. We also used web services between the pc client application and the web server. Another core technology of the system is RSS.
The power of Ruby on Rails' built-in MVC abstraction layers really shone when we ripped apart the entire admin GUI and reskinned it using a simpler version of the HTML/CSS. This was one of the deepest changes the client requested throughout our agile project process. We were able to complete this change with two of us pair-programming in a little over a week.
