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Why Low Latency Matters for Live Event Streaming

Learn more about low-latency live streaming at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media West, ESS103. Let's Sync Up: Understanding the Opportunities of Live Sports Streaming, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Michael Jones: I was at IBC recently, and I asked people, "Where is low latency? I've been talking about it. Give me an example of low latency." I mean, the only one I can think of is Thursday Night Football. And Amazon does about seven--at least when we checked it last year--it was about seven seconds. I'm not sure if it's better this season.

But ultimately, you know, this is one of the challenges that we face right now. The networks aren't there, the bandwidth isn't there, the services aren't optimized. You know, you have this. So, KDDI is a customer in Japan. Last month, they had the FIVB Volleyball World Cup. And on that one we got latency of under two seconds, in real world. But obviously it's in Japan, it's KDDI, it's a phenomenal network, and in this case, Fuji TV was streaming the regular linear broadcast, and KDDI had a parallel stream that was synchronized, with a chase cam of the most popular players, or you could do a ceiling cam to watch the strategy unfold and all of that as you saw the closeup.

This is something that when we look at it, as Mark said, anything you do as far as security can increase latency, and that's one of the huge challenges. And for everybody, you hear, in some cases, "Can we talk about sub-one second?" Realistically, we just don't see it happening in the foreseeable future. For some applications, for WebRTC, sure. But for a unicast stream using low-latency CMAF, it probably, you know, for three or four years, it probably isn't even, it probably isn't gonna happen, and even after that, it's gonna be extremely challenging.

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