--- title: "Web Developer" author: "Jarrod Carlson" company: "Turner Broadcasting System" industry: "Media & entertainment" location: "Atlanta, GA" period: "Sep 2006 – Jun 2010" tech: - "JSP" - "Tomcat" - "JavaScript" - "jQuery" - "Omniture" canonical: "https://builtbyjarrod.com/experience/turner-broadcasting" --- # Web Developer — Turner Broadcasting System Sep 2006 – Jun 2010 · Atlanta, GA > Global entertainment, sports, & news company; division of Time Warner **Summary:** Web developer in Turner Sports New Media — on PlayOn Sports from day one, then nba.com in the League Pass era, building early video-engagement telemetry — until the PlayOn brand left Turner, and I followed it. --- I joined Turner Sports New Media in 2006 and started on PlayOn Sports from day one — Turner's startup-inside-a-media-giant for long-tail live sports. My first desk was in the CNN Center downtown, just outside the Headline News group and Robin Meade's office; later we moved to the Techwood campus, where the really nice amenities live. After years of do-everything work at [the University of Georgia](/experience/uga.md), Turner was a different world — the recurring thought was *"oh, we have people for that."* No more designing my own site changes in Photoshop; there were rows of creative folks for that. ## PlayOn, take one PlayOn covered sports big enough to draw an audience but too small for a 53-foot production trailer — partnering with Raycom Media for production, we carried Division-I FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) football on ACCSelect.com and live United Soccer League matches. The whole PlayOn organization was maybe 25 people, with three or four developers on my team. I worked the front-end content side: dynamic pages rendered in JSP on Tomcat, peppered with hand-rolled vanilla JavaScript and a little jQuery, plus the era's obligatory wrestling with IE6. Turner's properties all ran on a custom in-house CMS that used JSP to statically publish HTML to Apache servers. I thought it was antiquated in 2009 — but it's the same system that kept CNN.com online through 9/11, a feat few peer sites managed. It was an early lesson that boring architecture is what's still standing when the traffic hits. ## Rows of developers When Turner divested PlayOn in 2008, I moved to the flagship: nba.com, with side work on nascar.com. My main project was video analytics for the Flash player NBA.com was rolling out for League Pass — watching live games online, still a novel idea. I built a facade wrapper around the Omniture SDK that let our developers ping engagement "heartbeats" from inside the player, tracking actual viewing time rather than page loads — genuinely new territory for video telemetry at the time. I also handled ad-slot placement inside that player for the all-access streams. My favorite scar from that era: for the NBA All-Star Game, fans could vote for MVP, and the league insisted the form be open and anonymous. It went about how you'd expect — we selectively removed hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes originating from mainland China, and the data was so poisoned in the end that our product director simply made a gut call and informed the league who had "won." It would not be my last encounter with anonymous internet traffic ruining something at scale. ## The StayOn team Turner's divestiture didn't end PlayOn overnight — there were contractual obligations to existing clients, seasons to finish out, and the few of us who remained were affectionately dubbed the **"PlayOn StayOn Team."** Meanwhile, David Rudolph was out raising the financing to buy the brand and run it independently. I liked Turner. But eighteen months on nba.com taught me something about myself: on a property with rows of developers and more content editors than I could count, I was becoming very specialized, very fast — and what I'd loved about PlayOn was the scrappy, wear-every-hat work of being expert at many things. When David's funding landed, he hired a CTO, the CTO hired a lead engineer, and the lead engineer hired me. I was stoked. The rest of that story — [PlayOn Sports, standalone](/experience/playon.md) — is where it gets good.