How to create and write to a virtual video device on Linux using C?

Question

Lately I have taken an interest in television signals, specifically building a TV signal transmitter, and after looking at my (lack of) equipment and knowledge, I have come to the conclusion that the only possible approach for me to start with here is to make a digital TV signal transmitter/simulator kind of software (I'll figure out which protocol/standard to use on my own) that can transmit a given video file running on a PC with Linux that is then fed back to a receiver program (like VLC) with a virtual device. However, I have encountered a bit of a roadblock: I have no idea how to create such virtual device and how to write data to it so that the receiver program can read it. I am going to be writing the transmitter simulation using C. I am under the assumption that the receiver program should be able to work fine if I just write the signal's bytes to the device and then set the receiver to the appropriate mode, given how these systems are digital. I also assume I am going to be using the /dev filesystem for this. I know I can create a device using a driver, but I was hoping that there's a simpler way to do this since I just want to create/open the device file, write to it, then wait for the receiver program to read it out and once my program terminates just delete it. All help is appreciated, thank you!