Cinema Playhouse TLV - Case study

Overview

Cinema Playhouse TLV is a film business in Israel with three public faces. playhouse.co.il is a Russian-language arthouse cinema and theatre site with screening listings by city, tickets, a club membership and a store. playhouse-cinema.com presents the distributor, which also covers production, dubbing and subtitles. playhouse-tlv.com, the production company site, now sends visitors to playhouse.co.il.

For this business Data Subsystems worked on an online streaming platform on an AWS backend, with an admin portal for content and users and scalable video distribution. The part preserved in code is the TV client: a React Native app on the react-native-tvos fork, with an Android TV launcher entry and an Apple TV target, a Russian-language interface that matches the cinema's audience, and trailer playback from Amazon S3.

The app browses the catalogue by section (home, series, films, new releases and kids) with an auto-advancing hero banner, poster rails and a genre row. Every film opens a detail screen with backdrop, ratings, runtime, cast and similar titles; cast members open their own pages; search runs from a full-screen input. Catalogue metadata was wired to the Kinopoisk API through a single data module.

What was built

React Native TV app on react-native-tvos 0.71 with an Android TV leanback launcher entry and TV banner, plus a tvOS target in the Xcode project.

Home screen with a hero slider that advances every 8 seconds, Recommended and Premieres poster rails, a genre row and a subscription banner offering 30 free days, no ads and four profiles.

Section screens for series, films, new releases and kids content, each loading a poster grid from the catalogue API.

Film detail screen: backdrop with gradient, countries, year, age rating, genres, IMDb and Kinopoisk ratings, runtime, description, cast list and similar films, with Watch and Trailer buttons.

Actor pages with photo, age, birthplace, facts and a filmography grid.

Full-screen trailer playback with react-native-video, streaming a trailer for one of the distributor's own releases from Amazon S3.

Search from the top menu: a full-screen input that sends the query to the catalogue API and renders results as a poster grid.

Stack

Frontend

React Native (tvOS fork): react-native-tvos 0.71 builds one TV client for Android TV and Apple TV
TypeScript: Screens, components and the data module of the TV app
React Navigation 6: Native stack navigation across home, sections, film, actor and search screens
react-native-video: Full-screen trailer player that closes when the trailer ends or full screen is dismissed
Android TV: Leanback launcher intent and TV banner so the app appears on the TV home screen
Next.js: Runs playhouse.co.il, the cinema's listings, tickets, club and store site

Infrastructure & DevOps

AWS: Backend of the streaming platform, its content and user admin, and video distribution
Amazon S3: Hosts the trailer video files the TV app streams
Vercel: Hosts and serves the Next.js site at playhouse.co.il

Integrations & Payments

Kinopoisk API: Films by type, film details, posters, people and search for the TV catalogue
OMDb API: Title search helper in the same data module

CMS & Commerce

Tilda: Builds the distributor site playhouse-cinema.com and the production company site playhouse-tlv.com

Tooling & QA

Jest: Test runner with react-test-renderer for the TV app
ESLint, Prettier: React Native community lint rules and consistent code formatting across the app

Engineering highlights

One codebase for both TV platforms: the react-native-tvos fork provides the Android TV and Apple TV builds, and the Android manifest registers a leanback launcher entry with a dedicated TV banner.

All catalogue calls (films by type, film detail, posters, people and search) live in one data module that the screens call, keeping API details out of the UI components.

Trailer playback streams from Amazon S3 into a full-screen react-native-video player that closes itself when the trailer ends or the viewer leaves full screen.