Thank you, PBS. That was terrible.

Back in 2012 we got this thing from PBS with video in it. There was some ruckus made, but I didn't really care at the time. It got plugged in and turned on and there it sat. For the next few years I paid it no heed.
The gist of it is as such:

• We're a PBS station, so we often enjoy playing PBS shows. Makes good sense.
• The shows we get from PBS? Those get sent via satellite. Satellite plays the show, we record it, and play it back later. Easy!
• Hey! What if the shows got downloaded from the Internet instead of being recorded in real-time? That'd be pretty neat. No more worries about the ISS clipping a statellite or whatever it is that messes things up.

And so the PBS NGIS program was born. (Next-Generation-Something-Something. Google it.) About two racks worth of kit has been grinding away in our server room, quietly downloading stuff from PBS for the last three years. Meanwhile, we've still been recording everything in real-time like we did in the 70's. (NRT, or Non-Real-Time, is another name/component of the system. They branded the living hell out of it. Logos and acronyms all over the place.)

I stumbled across it while working on another project. It took me about 45 minutes to hate the interface provided by PBS. Silverlight?! Come on, guys. It took a week or two to learn how to talk to the servers directly, and then over a weekend I absorbed it into my own frontend.

The frontend in question is The Monolith, a story for another time as it's terrifyingly deep. This story, however, is about a deliberate lack of depth. Lets say you work here blasting TV-rays out to the masses. What's that, you say? A raccoon birthed a litter in the satellite dish last night and ruined a recording? Whatever shall you do?  I can name that tune in three clicks:

    

Even though PBS provides thousands of pages of (beautifully composed, logo-crazy) documentation, what's listed above is all anyone here will ever to do with it. In fact, it's the only thing we're able to do with it. That mountain of documentation has about a paragraph's worth of functionality that doesn't require a PBS administrator's account (note: creds are all stored in clear text).

Not to toot my own horn, but that Rendition list? If you want to see the show's title, you'll need to use mine. The PBS techs told me that anything other than P123456-789 to identify a program was something they were "working on." Now I just need some sweet logos.