stb-tester.com
Celebrating 10 years of Stb-tester
04 Mar 2024.
Last December our company turned 10 years old (and we had started the Stb-tester open-source project at YouView 18 months before that).
Since founding our company 10 years ago, we have grown from a services-focused company in the first 2 years, to a primarily product-based company since 2016 with uninterrupted year-on-year sales growth and customers in 4 continents. In 2023 we had our best year yet, with sales up 50% compared to the previous year, and headcount up 25%. Now barely one quarter into 2024, sales are already on trajectory to exceed 2023’s growth, all the while we continue to release new features such as our latest “Smart Navigation” machine learning APIs.
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- 2012
- Started the Stb-tester open source project at YouView.
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- 2013
- Presented Stb-tester at the Google Test Automation Conference in
New York.
Founded Stb-tester.com Ltd.
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- 2014
First sales of our first product, the “Stb-tester ONE” hardware appliance.
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- 2016
- Revenue from product sales overtook revenue from services work.
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- 2017
Launched the Stb-tester Cloud portal + new “Stb-tester Node” hardware — enabling centralised access to test hardware spread across any number of physical locations, with slingbox-style video streaming and remote control from any web browser, 5 years before our competitors.
With this architecture we truly found our “product-market fit” and the sales data shows it!
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- 2018
- Sales of the Stb-tester Node continue to grow rapidly; we have customers
in 4 continents.
Released new audio-testing APIs and groundbreaking “Object Repository” tool for faster test development & maintenance.
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- 2019
- Technical improvements such as Python 3 support, IDE integration, and (as always) we continued to release new & improved image-processing APIs for your test scripts.
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- 2020-2021
- Our sales continued stable (and even grew slightly) throughout the pandemic, thanks in part to our slingbox-style capabilities that enable work-from-home testing.
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- 2022
We released our “second generation” Stb-tester Node hardware — fanless (totally silent), with a bump to CPU/GPU/RAM specs, and improved supply chain guarantees after weathering the chip shortage of 2021.
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- 2023
- Our best year yet, with sales up almost 50% compared to the previous year
and headcount up 25%.
Scaled our cloud portal architecture to support hundreds of simultaneous Stb-tester Nodes per installation.
Behind the scenes, a lot of R&D was focused on features you’ll be seeing in 2024…
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- 2024
- The first quarter isn’t over, and we have already released our new “Smart Navigation” machine learning APIs, with many more AI features and “codeless” editing to come!
Backward compatibility
Throughout all our new hardware models, architecture changes, and new APIs, we have maintained compatibility with the test scripts you have written with our older hardware & APIs. Backward compatibility is one of our core company values! We respect the time and effort you have invested into developing your test scripts. We have customers who started with our first “Stb-tester ONE” hardware appliance, migrated from the single-appliance model to our current cloud portal with distributed “Stb-tester Node” hardware, and are still running the same test scripts.
Thank you
We are very thankful to YouView who supported the original development of Stb-tester, and to you, our customers, for your business and feedback throughout the years. Here’s to another 10 years of mutually fruitful partnership!
About Stb-tester
Stb-tester is an automation tool for testing TV & video-streaming apps on real devices such as Android TV, Apple TV, Fire TV, PlayStation, Roku, XBox, and traditional Set-Top Boxes.