Panel: Preventing Failures on the Couch: What Works in the Lab but Breaks in the Living Room

Session details:

Streaming has solved the big problems: content pipelines, platform scale, and distribution partnerships. What is inherently a huge challenge to OTT is the final stretch: the payment method that doesn't work, the streaming app does not work on the user's 4-year-old TV, the UI is not localized, the ad that fires twice, or the app that crashes on a two-year-old set-top box. Internal QA and automation in lab environments catch predictable breaks. What they can't catch is what happens when millions of real households hit play — across dozens of markets, on real devices, real networks, real firmware, and payment methods nobody designed a test case for. This panel brings streaming technology and product leaders together to compare how they are closing that gap — what they test in-market, how they prioritize device and language coverage across regions, and where they've learned that no amount of automation replaces a human on a couch.