Search on a streaming platform looks simple from the couch. You type a few letters, results appear, you press OK. The interaction most people compare it to is Netflix or YouTube, and the comparison is fair — that is the bar.
What sits behind it is a fan-out. A single keyword goes to several content APIs at once, each returning a different kind of thing, and the interface has to resolve those responses into one ordered list that makes sense to someone holding a remote. That resolution is where the work is.
I built the search experience for a streaming platform on smart TVs using LightningJS.
One query, many sources
A streaming catalog is not one index. Movies, series, live channels, networks, and people each live behind their own endpoint, with their own response shape, their own latency profile, and their own idea of what a relevance score means.
