HBO Max launched on 26 October 2021 in the Nordics, and I was part of a large team of in-country testers — the only Finn. So the testing of Finnish localization across a multitude of platforms fell on me. But that wasn't all: the whole app had to be tested on iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Android tablets, multiple Android phones, Chromecast, NVidia Shield Pro (AndroidTV), Samsung Smart TV and browsers on both Windows and macOS (Chrome, Firefox, Safari).
We went through the major Nordic launch, then various discount offerings, and the season premiere and finale of House of the Dragon.
In the meantime I reported hundreds upon hundreds of metadata content issues — duplicate subtitle tracks, duplicate audio tracks, missing localized episode/film synopses, and adult material available to children due to invalid ratings conversion across regions. I went through the localization codebases for the mobile, Smart TV and tvOS flavors, and called out usability & UX issues. And, as a hobby, I asked enough questions to learn to use the HBO API to fetch metadata content directly from the database and compare it against what the live product actually showed.
I built a bash harness driving Android Debug Bridge (ADB) on macOS for cycling through the 18,000+ assets in the Nordics. It used the HBO API to fetch the full content lineage — every series, season and episode with its titles, namings, descriptions, and the playback URLs to auto-play each one — then drove the physical NVidia Shield Pro to change languages/settings and navigate the player by URL, capturing ADB screenshots of the audio-language and subtitle-language panels, synopsis and settings. The workflow merged each capture into a filename carrying the asset ID plus the title number / season / episode number / description, and spliced multiple screenshots together into a single full-information composite per asset. Beyond the language/subtitle sweep, I drove the whole app through ADB by typing and sending cursor keys directly to the device — account settings, user preferences, curated rows like "My List" and "Top 10 Comedies", and search — a large surface exercised entirely through the bridge. This was not "automation testing" (automated test scripts); it was an automated workflow exercising the content database at scale to discover bugs the human testers and their test suites were not capturing. (API load/exercise work here also used JMeter, as at XReach and Ellie.)
Bug reports went directly to the database-ingestion specialists and the macOS / Apple TV / iOS HBO Max developers, who acted on them — a fast, appreciated feedback loop. It was a role I genuinely thrived in.
"Esa has proven to be a valuable member of the test team and consistently identified high priority issues that needed to be fixed. With his wealth of technical knowledge and true passion for the application he is testing, he has been a stalwart champion for ensuring the highest level of quality for HBO. I wholeheartedly recommend Esa as a high end addition to any test team." — Matt Don, Senior Staff QA, Warner Bros. Discovery
Loved it there and miss it a great deal. The in-country testing team was cut at the end of 2022 amid Warner Bros. Discovery cost-savings. 10/10 would work there again.