Watching broadcasts through web page services is a common thing these days. From Twitch or YouTube streams to the Qatar 2022 World Cup, almost any content can be viewed over the internet. However, despite the development of the technologythere is still a problem: latency.
It has happened to all of us that we hear the neighbor shout a goal a few seconds before our screen shows this image. Not only through the web, but also on cable TV broadcasts. This delay is what is called latency..
“For the viewers, the biggest problem with video latency is the frustration of watching the moment after it happens. Over time, these frustrations related to video latency become problems for content providers.”, points out Amazon Web Services.
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The problem comes when the image does not show “in real time” what is happening. “When it comes to time-sensitive video content (such as televised news, games or sporting events, or purely OTT content) [Over-the-top]such as interactive shows or electronic sports), viewers expect to be able to watch events as they unfold”, he adds.
This can end up destroying the loyalty of the users, since there is always this delay. “In the world of real-time entertainment events, video latency issues are not just spoilers, as if left unaddressed, they affect the trust viewers have in their OTT content providers“, Add.
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What is causing latency during streams?
According to AWS, this is given by a series of steps in the screen-to-screen process:
- The length of the video encoding pipeline.
- The incorporation and packaging operations.
- The propagation in the network and the transport protocol.
- The content delivery network (CDN).
- The duration of the segments.
- Player policies: buffering, playhead location, resiliency.
Namely, It is not only due to whether we have a slow internet or not. It also includes the technology we use (we cannot expect a PC from 10 years ago to work like a current one, for example), what tools the platform where it is transmitted uses and how our device communicates with it.
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“In traditional adaptive bitrate streaming, video latency mainly depends on the length of media segments. For example, if the media segments are six seconds long, your player will already be six seconds behind the actual absolute time when it requests the first segment.”, notes AWS.
These segments will cause the images to reach the screens. “Also, each additional media segment buffered by the player before the actual start of playback will increase the time to reach the first decoded video frame“, business.
Therefore, it could be said that the players are the main responsible. “While many factors drive video latency (the duration of the video encoding pipeline, the duration of aggregation and packaging operations, network propagation delays, and CDN buffering (if applicable), )) the player itself is largely responsible for the overall latency of the videos”, he concludes.