A player that has to work on every screen in the country

A national broadcaster does not get to choose its audience's hardware. The same stream has to play on a current phone, a television bought eight years ago, a games console and a set top box, and each of those has a different media stack underneath it with different bugs in it.

Most of the difficulty is not in the common case. It is in the long tail: the device family where the picture is soft, the one where an advert stalls, the one where playback recovers from a network drop everywhere except there. None of it raises an error, so none of it appears in a dashboard. It appears as people leaving.

The work is playback engineering across that spread. Reproducing a fault on the device it happens on rather than on a laptop, working through the player rather than around it, and leaving the measurement behind so the next regression is caught before release rather than after.