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CMAF and Low Latency at Disney and Hulu

Learn more about low latency at Streaming Media East.

See complete videos and other highlights from Streaming Media West Connect on Streaming Media's YouTube channel.

Read the complete transcript of this video:

Nick Brookins: Latency is definitely an important metric for us. We're excited that CMF has exactly the building blocks for what we need at that layer for our low-latency strategy. The trick is that there are so many links in the chain that need to be optimized for this. Any one of them can mess up for you, but the common limitation is that we've often had to act upon full GOP structures and then limit the size of our segments based on that. So being able to address well-defined chunk structure in CMAF allows all of those components up the chain to begin acting on a smaller portion of content and just keep it flowing through her with minimal buffers along the way, while still keeping the experience good.

Bill Zurat: I take a step back and I just think about what low latency is. And I think about, what are we trying to solve here? Because a lot of people will just kind of glob it all together and just we've gotta be short as possible, but do we? Sometimes you can have a little fuzz. Do you want to beat satellite? Do you want to beat cable? Or do you want to beat over the air? Because you can do all those sorts of things if you understand what your requirements are. Certain--to a use metaphor--transactional elements to when you're watching something has to be incredibly low latency, based on business needs. Other times you don't have to be nearly as low latency. And if you can do that, then you can increase your quality.

Right now, there's the ability to do with some devices and some implementations, but then as we go wider, we don't get that uniformity that we're looking for from a product side. And that's where we have to struggle a little bit and see like where we have that balance. In a lot of ways, when we run our own experiments, we're getting pretty close to a latency that matches cable without doing anything. That's uber-, hyper-low latency.

So I just take a step back on it and I really do press people on the requirements, and what we're trying to do in terms of who we're trying to deliver it to.

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