A side project that turned into the hardest client-side engineering I've ever done.
I used to watch IPTV in my college mess hall — just open a website, pick a random channel, and zone out. No algorithm, no recommendations, no decisions. After long days when I had zero cognitive energy left, it was the perfect way to decompress — just watch whatever random broadcast was on, from wherever in the world. One day I thought: what if I turned this into something interactive? A game where you watch a live broadcast and try to guess which country it's from.
The game part was easy. The streaming part nearly broke me.
This is not a post about a guessing game. This is about the engineering problems I ran into while trying to make thousands of unreliable, globally distributed live video streams work reliably in a browser — and how I solved each one.
Problem 1: Most Live Streams Don't Actually Work
