Livestream Explains the Challenges of Streaming Live Video
There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a live steam, noted Mark Kornfilt, co-founder of Livestream. Getting viewers to understand that and not blame the wrong culprit is a difficulty.
Kornfilt was speaking at the recent Streaming Media Europe show in London, where he joined a panel on live streaming that included LiveU, Mobile Viewpoint, and Swiss TV. When asked about challenges, he spoke of managing expectations.
"The biggest challenge is setting expectations on the viewers' side," said Kornfilt. "Livestream has about 30 million unique visitors a month, about four-and-a-half million people signed up to use the service, so you have a really wide variety of content, right? But when people watch a bike race that's being filmed with one of these devices, what they see is they see Livestream, they see the brand around it, but then if something doesn't work, the challenge is, 'Well, Livestream's broken.'"
Delivering a smooth experience isn't always easy, but it can be hard to communicate where the stream is breaking down.
"For us, it's about managing that, and it's about notifying the users and letting the users know about what's going on. It helps also to let the users know what conditions the production is being done in, but it's not always possible," Kornfilt noted. "The biggest challenge is really setting the expectations for the viewers, for them to know what's going on on their screen."
For more on the challenges of live streaming, watch the full panel discussion below.
Live from (Almost) Anywhere
Moderator: Dom Robinson, Director, id3as
Michael Buehler, Sports Journalist, Swiss TV
Michel Bais, Managing Director, Mobile Viewpoint
Lorna Garrett, Director, Garland Partners Ltd
Ronen Artman, VP of Marketing, LiveU
Mark Kornfilt, co-founder, Livestream
Covering breaking news or delivering live entertainment from remote locations was once a cumbersome, complex, and costly process. Today, with the advent of cellular link aggregation, small encoders, and always-on live streaming services, that's all changed. But these new technologies have brought with them their own set of technological, business, and even ethical problems. Join this lively discussion and debate among vendors and news organisations to explore these issues and learn more about the cutting edge of mobile, live video capture and delivery.
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