BBC Says Latency Between Streaming and Live Broadcasts Can Be Nixed—With Industry Help
BBC R&D is eyeing “new innovations” to eliminate latency between an internet-delivered livestream and broadcast TV. Fans watching World Cup livestreams this summer on the BBC iPlayer experienced lags of 30 seconds, “with some complaining of hearing neighbours cheering goals…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
that they hadn’t seen happen yet,” it said Wednesday. Latency is prevalent with “vast majority of live video delivered over the internet” because it takes longer to send video over the net reliably, the public broadcaster said. Low-latency techniques on display at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam “work by either reducing the duration of each segment” of video, or by creating the segments “progressively as a series of chunks that can be passed through the chain immediately as they become available,” said BBC. “In the future, live streaming viewers watching over the internet will be able to see the action at the same time as they would see it if they were watching on TV.” Rolling out the technology commercially “will take time, and it needs coordination with the whole industry," BBC R&D said.