Senior Software Engineer · Video Playback · Streaming · Chromecast · TypeScript Philadelphia, PA · walter.pollardjr.com

I wrote my first line of production code in 1999 and I've been learning ever since.

I've been building for the web through every major era: the Flash boom, LAMP was the only REAL stack, the rise of streaming video, the shift to adaptive bitrate, the Chromecast revolution, and now AI-augmented engineering.

• LAMP stack — PHP + Flash ran the internet
• Flash ActionScript 2 → 3! — and we thought it would last forever
• Adobe turns Flash into dancing pandas and Apple twists the dagger 🗡️
• The REACT era begins — virtual DOMs, SSR/SSG, component everything
• AI agentic era learns from our mistakes and writes code I would

• ActionScript3 opens up AS3 backend development
• .NET rises and everyone jumps on ASP
• Git kicks SVN to the curb
• jQuery makes everyone start thinking... libraries
• Ruby and those Rails
• MVC era — who didn't have a model, view, controller?
• Backbone said Flash isn't the only way to do SPA
• Can we say TOOLING? — TypeScript, Webpack, Babel, oh my!
• Node.js arrives and Express opens the door
• Tailwind makes CSS actually enjoyable (fight me)

From '99 til Adobe bought and rode poor Flash into its grave. "You know JavaScript, you just don't know it yet" was told to me — and wow, was it true.

Transitioned into JavaScript and haven't looked back. Ad agency days, freelancing through the .com bubble busting, countless prototypes, and eventually settling into what I was meant to do: video player development.

From "click to download the full video" to early buffering to the gift of RTMP/E streaming — that path led me to Comcast.

My Comcast story actually started at FEARnet — the horror network. As a Flash AS3 developer I was building micro-sites for tentpole movie events, horror promotions, live web interviews with people in the film industry. It was a creative playground and for a while it was fun and challenging. Then the 2008 crash hit and I found myself freelancing.

After some contractor years I came back to Comcast, this time with CIM (Comcast Interactive Media); and that's where everything changed.

For 13 years I was the Subject Matter Expert for Xfinity Stream's HD video player — the playback engine behind one of the largest cable platforms in the country. I shipped ad systems that served millions of impressions, built DRM pipelines that protected premium content, and worked directly with Google's Cast team to bring Chromecast from MVP to production.

I was in the room at Comcast Interactive Media when we started building what became Xfinity Stream. I was on the team that built the desktop-to-Chromecast viewing experience from scratch. Watching a company pet project — "TV on the web" — grow into a cornerstone product for one of the largest media companies in the country was something I'll carry with me forever.

In the mid 2000s I started a project on embedded devices — set-top boxes and Flash apps. I was full-on AS3 and pushing/testing on slow, outdated 1st gen TV/web devices. I decided building a tool that emulated the set-top box would save me time. The amount of time spent making the tool instead of working on the actual project ended up saving me more time than if I'd just kept pushing through the 'slow'.

I started building Flash "modules" — snippets of Flash with AS3 as tools: parsing checkers, apps to monitor build processes, inspection utilities.

Probably my biggest debug tool: Xfinity Stream's desktop video player has a debug panel with 7+ tabs of features I built. QA and other devs could inspect streaming data in ways they never could before. I built it on my own, presented it as a quick inspection tool, and it's still in the Xfinity HD player to this day.

I've always gravitated toward debugging tooling — when you're the Chromecast lead and something breaks on a device you can't inspect, you build the tools to see inside it. That instinct carries through everything I do.

Today I'm combining all of that experience with modern tools — Next.js 15, TypeScript, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, and the Google Cast SDK.

I've been AI-assisted since code-complete in Flex Builder was pretty good, watched snippets grow in size and intelligence, and now I'm deep in the AI-assisted engineering space — not just using one tool but working across the full ecosystem to find what works best for each problem.

• Video & Streaming — HLS, MPEG-DASH, CMAF, MSE/EME, Video.js, Dash.js, Shaka Player
• Chromecast — Google Cast Application Framework (CAF), custom receivers, sender/receiver architecture, namespace messaging
• Ad Tech — DAI, SSAI, CSAI, FreeWheel, Google IMA SDK, VAST 3/4
• DRM — Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay, EME, Adobe Primetime DRM
• Frontend — React, Next.js, SvelteKit, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Electron
• AI-Native Workflow — Claude Code daily driver, Gemini integrations, building AI into real products
• Debugging at Scale — custom diagnostic tooling used org-wide at Comcast
• Communication — can explain a video pipeline to a VP and a CSS bug to a junior dev in the same meeting. ASL speaker.
• Process Instinct — 25 years across agencies, startups, and enterprise taught me when process helps a team ship and when it's red tape slowing everyone down

1999  ██ Unisys — Web Dev + Systems Test Engineer (Drexel co-op)
2004  ████ Flash era — Vantage, FEARnet, E! Online, Razorfish, Empathy Lab
2007  ██████ Comcast Entertainment Group — FEARnet tech lead
2009  ████████ Freelance — Constellation.tv (live HD streaming, Akamai CDN)
2012  ██████████████████████████ Comcast — 13 years: Xfinity Stream SME,
                                          Chromecast lead, ad systems, DRM,
                                          debugging tooling at national scale
2025  ████████████████████████████ Now — AI-native engineering, Next.js 15,
                                        building what's next

I'm always up for conversations about video engineering, streaming architecture, Chromecast development, or what it's like to build for the web across three decades.

📧 walter@pollardjr.com · 🌐 walter.pollardjr.com · 💼 LinkedIn