How Circle Eliminated 60% of Video Bugs with React Native Video V7

Can you tell us about Circle?

"Circle is a community platform. We serve creators who want to bring their communities together in one place — courses, live streams, events, and discussions. I lead the mobile team."

How many users are on V7?

"We have around 1.3 million users across iOS and Android. We started the V7 migration about a year ago and now the majority of our active users are on it."

What was video like before V7?

"We were using a WebView with a regular HTML5 video tag. It worked initially, but as we scaled, around 60 percent of our bugs were because of video. Seeking, buffering, controls — all of it was unreliable."

Why not a commercial player like Bitmovin?

"We looked at them. The problem is their pricing is based on impressions. Our users watch a lot of content. If we're paying more for the player based on impressions, it just doesn't add up for our model."

What made open source the right choice?

"Full control. We can see the code, fix issues ourselves, and we're not locked into a vendor's roadmap. Plus, knowing that TheWidlarzGroup maintains it and we can get support directly — that gives us the safety net of a commercial product without the downsides."

Does it matter that a company is behind the OSS project?

"Absolutely. An open-source project without a maintainer is a risk. Knowing there's a team whose business depends on this library being great — that changes the equation entirely."

Biggest wins after migrating?

"Sideloaded captions were huge for us. Also Picture-in-Picture, background audio, and native HLS on both platforms. These weren't possible with the WebView approach. The playback is just rock-solid now."