Frame-Accurate Sync and Multiscreen Streaming Experiences
As streaming consumers increasingly gravitate toward multiview sports and multiscreen experiences that combine content from phones and CTVs and other devices, does lack of sync across devices or different feeds or content sources threaten to scuttle or detract from the seamlessness of that experience? Roku’s Margret Schmidt, SVT Play’s Annika Bidner, Hub Entertainment Research’s Shannon McKenzie, and Chris Pfaff Tech Media’s Chris Pfaff discuss various scenarios in which sync is more or less critical in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2026.
How Important Is Frame-Accurate Sync?
Chris Pfaff begins the conversation by saying, “Nothing’s going to kill a synchronized multi-screen experience than 10-second latency.” He asks Margret Schmidt to answer the question, “How do you tackle that kind of frame-accurate sync across all of the device stack?”
Margret admits, “Well, I actually have an opinion that a lot of TV doesn’t need to be that close to [frame-accurate sync]. This is a decompression activity, this is lean-back.” She acknowledges that sports needs to sync, and Roku has “private listening where we can sync with your phone and make sure that you can get the audio exactly with the TV.” However, Margret says, “My sense is, there’s not a lot that should have to be that synchronized between a user, say, [and] a second device.”
Chris turns to Shannon McKenzie, referring to her work at NBCUniversal: “You’re right in the thick of this kind of real-time entertainment. What do you see today in terms of trying to close that gap?”
Shannon believes that when super fans expect real-time data, “whether that’s for betting or for just understanding stats or whatever it is they’re consuming, giving them the opportunity to refresh at their own rate” is important. “Just pull down and swipe and see the stats refresh, that’s something that can help them manage their own expectations about how much lag they have in their video. If it’s 9 seconds to 15 seconds and you’ve got data coming up that spoils it, it will depend on the event. Baseball is a particularly slow event. Premier League, you may want to see it pretty quickly. NASCAR, you’re trying to watch everything and do your multi-cam too.”
Shannon highlights the importance of user control in that experience, “and being able to give them the tools to do that very easily, so that to Margret’s point, not everything has to be perfectly synced. There’s a whole understanding of what community means, and nothing’s perfectly synced even when you’re in the stadium. You’re watching the event, you’re getting your hot dog, you’re doing all this other stuff. Nothing is perfectly synced up. So I think we appreciate that.”
When Sync Doesn’t Have to Be Exact
For any type of viewing, be it sports or a drama, Shannon asserts, “creating that stickiness of the ecosystem itself is really a lot more important than actually trying to make everything perfectly aligned technically. And that’s where things like—and both Annika [Bidner] and Margret mentioned it—for sports, like player biostats, that’s a great thing where you may want to see something in real time, but it doesn’t have to be real time. Leo Messi is still five seven. That hasn’t changed in the entire course of his career.
Shannon continues, “Drama is a great example, particularly YA content where you’ve got young people coming in, where you don’t know the actors, [and] you don’t know a lot of the details around it. It doesn’t have to all be perfectly synced. I’m thinking of, right now, Sterling Point that dropped last week on Amazon Prime. … You’ve got all of this community around it with social Reels and BookTok, TikToks.” That content “doesn’t have to be exactly synced with the real-time data. And yet it can be.” She points to Amazon X-Ray, which can educate viewers about actors they don’t know. “Those are the kinds of things where you can create the broader environment without making it so perfectly synced all the time,” she notes.
SVT Play’s Approach
Chris agrees that X-Ray is useful. “Annika, what do you see in this sort of sync issue with SVT Play?” he asks.
Annika replies, “I agree with both Shannon and Margret that it’s important of course to not lag, but it doesn’t have to be zero seconds because people don’t expect that and it’s super hard. The devices behave differently. It will be different anyway. So we try to trim it as much as possible, but we don’t put that much effort into making it exactly right.”
She shares SVT Play’s strategy: “We try to send out notifications a little bit late so that they don’t come before something [such as a game win] happens. … So we try to not do that. But in one sense, I think it’s quite important to be exact.” One way the company does that is to prioritize a sound sync in its companion app with the TV during one of Sweden’s biggest shows, “where they drive a train to different places and you guess where [we are] going. And it’s really important who wins. … There’s a ranking in Sweden [of] who was the best one this week. And you can’t cheat.” Annika clarifies with a smile, “So, of course you can cheat anyway, but, I mean, we’ll try to make it really hard.”
Join us November 9–11, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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