Pushbutton

» see pushbutton.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Pushbutton never put its name on anything anybody watched. It was an agency, so the screen always belonged to the client, and the only people who knew whose code was running the voting page or the episode guide were the people who had commissioned it.

It was founded in 2002 as Push Button Limited by three executives out of BSkyB. Paula Byrne had run the team that delivered interactive applications on Open...., the shopping and banking platform that became Sky Active once Sky bought out its partners. James Cumberbatch arrived from the same employer in 2004 as development director and became a co-owner, a design studio opened in Brighton that year, and the main office moved into Soho in 2007 and then to Smithfield in 2008. There was a separate administrative office in Harpenden the whole time.

Between 2007 and 2010 it won the work that agencies of that kind lived on: Disney, National Geographic, the BBC, Sky, ITV, Foxtel in Australia, and Camelot, which runs the British lottery. None of that was visible in Turkey. The television in our living room had no way of sending anything back, the internet lived on a separate machine in another room, and an application delivered down the aerial was something i only ever read descriptions of.

~ the case file ~

~ the middleware ~

The satellite work ran on OpenTV, the set-top operating environment that almost nobody outside the industry has heard of and that several million households used every evening. The broadband side was ordinary by comparison, browsers and Flash, or Microsoft's Mediaroom platform on BT Vision. Working on both sides was the unusual part: most shops did one or the other.

The oldest ITV applications were written in a bespoke XML targeting something called GEOFF, a browser-like framework that Carlton Interactive Media had built around the time Carlton and Granada merged. By the time Pushbutton inherited it, the framework had been simplified down to a templated subset that the agency could work in quickly.

~ two products and a partnership ~

On 22 March 2011 Pushbutton announced two products of its own, pbRemote and pbTV, after nine years of building other people's. The next day it announced a partnership with Grooveshark, the American music streaming service that would eventually be sued into the ground. Four months later the company was inside Amazon and neither product was heard of again.

~ bought for the staff ~

Amazon announced the acquisition on 28 July 2011 and disclosed no terms. It had bought LoveFilm in January of the same year, and LoveFilm's television apps were Pushbutton work, so the logic was not hard to follow: the buyer already owned the client and now it owned the supplier. No product changed hands in any meaningful way. A staff list did.

In 2012 Amazon merged the Pushbutton people with LoveFilm's developers into a London media development centre, with Byrne running it. The name was retired at that point and has not been used since. pushbutton.co.uk today serves a brokerage page inviting offers in dollars, and that offer box is the last interactive element the brand has left.

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