Managing Multi‑Platform Releases at Tubi with Hubble: Challenges and Solutions

Tubi’s goal of “Stream anywhere” means its app runs on over a hundred devices—web, mobile, TV, Blu‑ray players, game consoles, set‑top boxes, and OTT platforms like Roku and Fire TV. Maintaining rapid iteration across such a large ecosystem with limited resources was a major challenge, prompting the creation of an internal release‑management tool called Hubble.

Challenges of Maintaining Multiple Platforms

Keeping teams synchronized about what features have shipped, what is in development, and any blockers is difficult even though more than 80% of the codebase is shared; engineers often have to search through git hashes or ask colleagues to determine if a change is live on a specific platform.

When a platform release is completed, engineers must manually inform product, QA, and other stakeholders about the changes for regression testing, which incurs high human and opportunity costs.

The Birth of Hubble

Recognizing the need for a service to collect, organize, and display release information, the team built Hubble. A release entity in Hubble consists of three parts:

Git change history: Hubble compares each new version with the previous one and automatically generates a changelog from the intervening commit messages.

Story mapping: Each GitHub pull request is linked to a Clubhouse story, providing product‑focused details that are easier for non‑engineers to understand; Hubble pulls these stories to create a readable list for each release.

QA notes: Engineers can add special testing hints when merging; Hubble aggregates these into a separate “QA notes” list to ensure important regression points are not missed.

How Hubble Integrates with Our Existing Architecture

To get Hubble running, a project is defined by providing a name, GitHub URL, and the current production git hash. Hubble then handles data collection, version comparison, and presentation automatically.

New versions are pulled into Hubble via two mechanisms—REST API calls or synchronization with GitHub Releases. At Tubi we use a unified Ansible‑based deployment pipeline; adding a call to Hubble’s API at the end of the playbook creates a new version for the current release.

All Tubi teams, including backend, quickly adopted Hubble for managing their release versions.

Using Automation to Solve Pain Points

Hubble has evolved from a simple release‑display portal into a component that participates in multiple stages of the development workflow, boosting overall efficiency.

Timely and Appropriate Release Notifications

To reduce communication overhead, Hubble is integrated with Slack. Anyone can subscribe to a project’s release feed with a simple command, and Hubble pushes a link to the new version to the subscribed users and channels.

Avoiding Unannounced Test‑Environment Overwrites

Developers use test environments that mirror production. Previously, communication about who was using which environment was informal and sometimes led to accidental overwrites. Hubble now records each test‑environment deployment and notifies the team when a machine’s user changes, preventing silent conflicts.

Supplementing the CI Platform

Tubi’s CI runs builds, automated tests, and other engineering tasks, but some steps—like Lighthouse performance analysis for each pull request—produce data that isn’t directly tied to the PR’s impact. Hubble adds a feature that compares Lighthouse reports across versions and posts the differences back to the corresponding GitHub PR, making performance regressions or improvements immediately visible.

Conclusion

Tools are not silver bullets, but a well‑designed tool can dramatically improve the developer experience. As the Tubi team continues to grow, we will keep seeking ways to maintain rapid iteration. We value providing engineers with an efficient development environment—if you share this interest, consider joining us!

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