BFI Case Study - Player Platform Architecture Review

As BFI Player scaled, the British Film Institute engaged Understanding Solutions for an independent architecture review. The result: a clear, actionable roadmap to improve scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency—delivered with hands-on collaboration and lasting capability for internal teams.

The Challenge our Client Faced

 The British Film Institute (BFI) operates BFI Player, a flagship streaming service hosting an extensive library of films for audiences across the UK. However, as the platform grew, so too did the complexity of its underlying architecture. The client recognised risks around scalability, maintainability, and cost-efficiency, but lacked a clear roadmap for improvement. With competing demands across teams and limited specialist architecture resource internally, BFI needed an independent review to shine a light on the platform’s current state and recommend tangible improvements.

Our Solution

Understanding Solutions deployed an experienced Solution Architect with deep expertise in streaming services and cloud-native architectures. The engagement began with a structured discovery process, including workshops with technical stakeholders, review of infrastructure and application dependencies, and an assessment of platform resilience and cost efficiency.
Rather than simply producing a high-level report, Understanding Solutions worked side by side with BFI’s teams, mapping out pain points in real time and explaining trade-offs for different technology decisions. This gave the organisation clarity on both the immediate issues and the longer-term implications of their architectural design.
The review covered areas such as cloud hosting, scalability under peak loads, monitoring and alerting practices, and the integration of third-party services. Crucially, USol provided BFI with a prioritised roadmap, breaking down recommendations into manageable phases that aligned with their budget, resourcing, and future growth plans.

The Impact

At the end of the engagement, BFI received a clear, actionable architecture review report, but more importantly, they gained confidence and shared understanding across their teams about where the platform stood and how it should evolve. The roadmap we delivered gave BFI a path forward that balanced quick wins - such as optimising monitoring practices and improving cloud cost efficiency - with strategic initiatives like strengthening scalability for future subscriber growth.
By embedding knowledge transfer throughout, USol ensured the BFI technical team not only understood the recommendations but had the capability to act on them. This left the organisation in a stronger position, with the clarity to make informed investment decisions and the tools to sustain a robust, scalable, and cost-efficient BFI Player platform.