Meanwhile, a field engineer for the chip vendor had diagnosed the root cause: Netflix’s Android TV application, called Ninja, was not delivering audio data quickly enough.
The Netflix application is complex, but at its simplest it streams data from a Netflix server, buffers several seconds worth of video and audio data on the device, then delivers video and audio frames one-at-a-time to the device’s playback hardware.
This story really exemplifies an aspect of my job I love: I can’t predict all of the issues that our partners will throw at me, and I know that to fix them I have to understand multiple systems, work with great colleagues, and constantly push myself to learn more.