Bomanbridge
Bomanbridge Media distributes thousands of hours of television to broadcasters worldwide, and buyers need to screen a title before they license it. We built their online screening room: a WordPress catalogue kept in sync with their Vimeo library through a custom API integration, so the sales team never entered a programme twice.
A registration-gated WordPress catalogue, built and maintained by Chillybin across a six-year relationship, that let broadcast buyers browse, filter and screen Bomanbridge's programme library online.
The Challenge
What we were solving
Bomanbridge Media is a Singapore-based television content distributor and co-production partner, founded and led by Sonia Fleck. The company represents production houses around the world, with a catalogue of roughly 4,000 hours spanning documentaries, animation, reality, factual entertainment, lifestyle and drama, sold to broadcasters and platforms across Asia and beyond.
In TV distribution the website is not a brochure, it is the shop floor. An acquisitions executive at a broadcaster wants to find a title, watch the promo, screen an episode and make a call. Bomanbridge's existing site made that harder than it should have been: the design undersold the catalogue and buyers struggled to find what they were looking for.
There was an operational problem underneath the visual one. The programme library lived in Vimeo, where the team uploaded promos, previews and full episodes. Keeping a website catalogue aligned with that library by hand means every new title is entered twice, and the two copies drift apart the moment anyone is busy (which in a sales-driven distribution business is always).
Success looked like one catalogue, not two: a site where buyers could register, browse and screen without friction, and where the Bomanbridge team could keep selling instead of doing data entry.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
Treat the website as a screening room, not a showreel
Watching television is an immersive experience, and a site built to sell television should get out of the way. We stripped back the interface around the videos rather than adding to it: no clutter competing with the player, genres colour coded so buyers can orient themselves at a glance, and a catalogue that filters and sorts by tag, date and A-Z. Because the full episodes are commercially sensitive, viewing sits behind user registration, and we spent real design time on that flow so signing up and pressing play felt like one motion rather than a gate.
Sync the catalogue from Vimeo, do not retype it
The core engineering decision was a custom Vimeo API to WordPress synchronisation. Vimeo stayed the single source of truth for the video library; the sync created and updated a WordPress post for each programme automatically. That structure matters commercially, because a plain embedded video cannot be merchandised. With every title as its own post, the sales team could layer marketing information onto the catalogue (synopsis, imagery, positioning for the titles they were pushing that market) without touching the video pipeline at all.
The build itself was a custom, responsive, retina-ready WordPress child theme on the Beaver Builder framework, delivered through a seven-week schedule from discovery to handover in 2018.
Stay for the run of the series
Bomanbridge was a Chillybin website care client from 2016, before this build, and remained one long after it. We hosted the site on WP Engine and ran the maintenance schedule (updates, backups, security monitoring, performance checks) for years, and in 2022 we launched a refreshed version of the site and handed the client's coordinator a full owner's manual covering logins, hosting, software licences and who to call when something breaks. Distribution companies live and die by market weeks like MIPCOM and the Asia TV Forum; a screening site that falls over during one is a real cost, so the care plan was part of the product.
The Solution
What we delivered
Bomanbridge got a catalogue that worked the way its buyers do: register once, then browse, filter and screen 4,000 hours of programming without a follow-up email. The Vimeo sync removed the double handling that makes video catalogues rot, so the site stayed current as fast as the library grew.
The company has kept growing since, acquiring UK distributor West One International in 2025 and closing licensing deals across Asia Pacific, Europe and North America. The platform Chillybin built and maintained carried the catalogue through those years of growth.
What we learned
When a client's inventory lives in another system, the website should subscribe to it, not copy it. The Vimeo sync was the least visible part of this build and the most valuable: every hour it saved the sales team was an hour spent selling, and the catalogue never drifted out of date. We have applied the same single-source-of-truth rule to property feeds, member databases and product catalogues since.
The other lesson is that restraint is a deliverable. TV people have strong visual instincts, and the temptation on a media site is to decorate. Stripping the interface back so the content carries the site took discipline, but it is exactly what made the screening experience feel like television rather than a website about television.
