Dave Lucia on Building TV Labs
From Elixir Mentor by Jacob Luetzow
February 14, 2026 · 1h 29m · Season 1 · Episode 73
About this episode
Dave Lucia discusses the development of an AI-powered smart TV testing platform at TV Labs, focusing on technical challenges and the use of Elixir.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Jacob Luetzow
Guest: Dave Lucia
Topics covered
- AI-powered smart TV testing
- Elixir programming
- device management
- cloud technology
- streaming apps
- observability
- multi-region infrastructure
Keywords
- smart TV
- AI testing platform
- Elixir
- device lab
- streaming apps
- observability
- cloud infrastructure
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: TV Labs, Bloomberg
Products: WebRTC, OpenTelemetry, Claude, Lua 5.3, Apple TVs, Fire TVs, Rokus
Places: AI
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