Livestream, radio and recorded sermons are three different kinds of media — live video, live audio, and on-demand playback — and the easy engineering shortcut would have been three separate players for three separate experiences.
We built MyChurchApp PRO around a single player instead, because from a member's perspective, the distinction between "livestream" and "sermon recording" often doesn't matter — they just want to watch or listen to their church. The player detects what's playing and adapts controls accordingly, rather than forcing a member to learn three different interfaces depending on the content type.
That adaptation has to happen without the member noticing it's happening. A livestream needs a "live" indicator and no scrubber, since there's nothing to scrub to yet; a recorded sermon needs a full scrubber and a resume-from-last-position feature that a live broadcast can't offer. A radio stream needs neither, but benefits from a background-play mode that keeps audio running while someone checks another app. Three different underlying behaviours, presented through what looks to the member like one consistent, familiar player.
The livestream and radio widget handles the live broadcasting side specifically — low-latency enough to feel present for a Sunday service, resilient enough to keep working on a spotty connection rather than dropping the stream entirely.
Resilience on a spotty connection mattered more here than it might for a typical media app, because the people watching a livestream are often doing so precisely because they couldn't be physically present — someone travelling, someone unwell, someone in an area with a weaker church presence. A stream that buffers constantly or drops entirely defeats the purpose for exactly the members who need it most, so the player is built to degrade gracefully — dropping video quality automatically to keep audio uninterrupted, rather than freezing the whole stream while it tries to catch up.
One player, three sources, no separate app to open depending on what a member wants to watch or hear — that consistency is worth more than the small engineering convenience of building three simpler, separate pieces.
