Some embodiments provide a system for simultaneously monitoring a content stream that is streamed using any of a plurality of streaming protocols from different points-of-presence (PoP) from within a distributed platform in real-time without the need for manual visual verification. The system is implemented with different emulation engines, each providing client-side player emulation for a different streaming protocol. The client-side player emulation involves requesting and downloading content stream chunks from a specified PoP according to the streaming protocol that is used by the distributed platform to stream the content stream under test. As part of the emulation, each instance inspects the downloaded chunks without decoding or rendering in order to track real-time performance and any errors in the server-side transmission of the content stream under test.