Scaling Low Latency to all

This article is part 18 of the "21 Thoughts on Video Streaming in 2021"-series.

Negar Hajihoseini (Innovation Engineer at THEO Technologies) shares her 2021 thoughts on how low latency is becoming available to anyone through cheap, scalable HTTP technology. 👇

2020 ended, but the Covid-19 era is not completely gone yet. More than 80% of the organizations worldwide have encouraged - or required - employees to work from home due to Covid-19 pandemic.

Almost all academic and business conferences around the world were held online – if not postponed to the post-Covid time.

Online Streaming is playing a main role in the educations at all levels and forms. Yes, in 2021, Online Streaming is not limited to sports and entertainment events anymore. A lot of educational and professional events will be streamed online. Thanks to ultra-low latency HTTP streaming protocols, saying goodbye to cable and antennas is now closer than it has ever been.

With such an ultra-low latency HTTP Streaming protocol, video is split further than segments to CMAF (Common Media Application Format) chunks. This allows an encoder to push small video chunks of few MegaBytes rather than large video segments, making possible the delivery of content in almost real time over DSL networks.

CDN companies are adapting their network with innovative caching methods to handle the ultra-low latency delivery of content to their customers all around the world. It is now possible to cache as small as byte ranges of an object to make sure that the content is delivered with the least possible latency.

Scalable HTTP adaptive streaming based protocols remain cheap in scale, efficient in bandwidth usage, and open a door to an exciting future for the online streaming industry!

(One example of such a low latency HTTP streaming protocol leveraging CMAF is LL-DASH. More info can be found at https://www.theoplayer.com/blog/low-latency-dash and https://bitmovin.com/live-low-latency-streaming-p2/.)