Ultra-Low Latency Interactive Live Streaming Survey Report Launches
As the live-streaming revolution continues to scale up, content creators and content distributors are trying to find a path forward between reasonable cost and scale. A new report launching today, titled Current Trends in Ultra-Low Latency Interactive Live Streaming, addresses several likely ways to balance competing demands on the content creation-distribution continuum.
Sponsored by AMD, crafted by Help Me Stream Research Foundation, and produced by Streaming Media magazine, the new report expands on a live keynote presentation of the same name from November’s Streaming Media Connect event.
On one hand, the performance required from the average live-streaming production kit has increased, but so has the cost of delivering live streams. Our survey respondents sense this disconnect. “Scaling is a problem when supporting multiple live services,” one respondent noted when asked about the aspirational advancements they’d like to see over the next two years.
To address the balance, the report notes that three areas need to be considered: price, performance, and power. One suggested way to deal with distribution bottlenecks is for the industry to provide “more efficient and cost-effective IP broadcast solutions using public internet” pipes, while another respondent noted that the next two years needs to bring “better compression technology and larger internet bandwidth [capacity].”
We also note in the report that it’s clear that live-streaming workflows are trending toward a seller’s market—at least in the short term—as a full quarter of respondents said 100% of their live-streaming workflow requires transcoding. A bit harder to judge is the performance aspect, as content workflows appears to still be mainly focused on AWS or on-premise processing. The former continues to dominate the cloud-centric live-streaming workflow consolidation we’ve seen across the industry, but the re-emergence of on-premise workflows provides an opportunity to lower costs while raising transcoding performance bars for workflows that are coupled with wide-pipe delivery of multiple-rendition streams to an appropriately broad delivery network.
The report also covers a number of baselines around bandwidths, codecs, and resolutions used in the live-streaming workflows of large- and medium-sized broadcast, OTT, and live-event streaming companies.
One point of note: 1080p resolutions stubbornly refuse to cede ground to 4K, but that’s good news for hardware-acceleration component manufacturers such as our sponsor AMD. Not only does hardware acceleration thrive on mass adoption of streaming at scale, it also provides a platform from which power innovations can be used scale up rational approaches from both a financial and power-consumption standpoint.
We’ll continue to research the power-consumption question, both in the lab and through surveys like this, as we move into 2025. For now, though...
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