When talking about live streaming, latency is always a hot topic and often a pain point for broadcasters, OTT TV and online gaming companies. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, the best way to define it is when you have a large audience watching a live event and as they are watching it, the audience experiences buffering, waiting for the content to be delivered. As you can tell, managing latency and being able to deliver content in real-time are essential, especially when you’re streaming an event live, like the final match of the champions league, to millions of connected devices.
The factors behind latency can range from issues with encoding and transport protocols to network and different player policies. However, there is a solution to fix the problem or at least, make latency unnoticeable, but first, let’s understand the different types of latency. As you can see from the graph below, there are 5 levels of latency: high, standard, low, ultra-low and sub-second. For each type and duration of latency there is are formats ideal for different purposes and situations that content providers need to take into consideration.
According to Conviva, 9% of video requests take too long, so much that viewers actually click/tap away to something else before the video starts. Even a delay between 4 to 10 seconds could be too much when they are watching their favorite team and having to wait to cheer (or cry) can be a good enough reason for them to want to change their content provider.
This is where MainStreaming comes in, as its innovative video-focused technology and native one-hop architecture is able to decrease latency by up to 3x the standard rate, essentially increasing the speed of your streams TTFF (Time To First Frame) and its E2E (End-to-end) delivery.
How you may ask?
First, the video streaming environment has drastically changed since traditional delivery infrastructures were created to deliver just images and there’s no way, you’d still want to ride a horse to get to where you need to go when you have the ability to get to your destination faster and with more comfort (quality) in a car. That’s why we built MainStreaming, as today’s streaming needs for broadcasters, OTT TV and gaming companies are focused on speed and maintaining the highest quality of experience for their audiences’ while being agile and scalable.
Second, we support SRT and WebRTC the newest protocols that are essential to being able to stream video in ultra-low latency. We also support RTP and RTSP, technologies that preceded SRT and WebRTC but are function perfectly when it comes to streaming live. These technologies, powered by our intelligent network, guarantee a real-time experience and are the perfect choice when it comes to dealing with interactivity and stream quality (at the same time), especially when you’re playing your favorite game.
Audiences expect the best and demand the highest quality. Enable it with innovative technology like ours that focuses on streaming video in ultra-low latency.
