21581 - SCTE Broadband August2022 COMPLETE v1

72 Vol. 44 No. 3 - September 2022 Issue by Alexandre Arnodin, Ateme What’s blocking low latency? Introduction You’re watching a major football final live streamed to your main screen when your neighbours cheer for a goal 40 seconds before you actually see it. This is the classic, borderline clichéd conundrum routinely trotted out to illustrate how the user experience is spoiled when viewing live content OTT. The question is, why has this problem not yet been solved? It is even more of a puzzle when you consider that the technologies exist to deliver streamed content live at scale and with a latency on par with that of traditional broadcast. Why is this still happening today? Many technology companies have announced solutions for OTT low-latency streaming over the past few years, but viewers still face the same issue. Despite the growing popularity of streaming services, reducing OTT latency remains both a challenge for content providers, broadcasters and service providers, and a major source of frustration for audiences. Is there a way to efficiently deliver lower latency at a large scale while preserving visual quality? Is low latency realistically achievable today in production? The answer is an emphatic yes! Low-latency OTT is not just theoretical: it is live. In this white paper, we will look into what has been blocking low latency—and how to finally remove those barriers. We’ll also take a look at further enhancements that are expected soon to make low latency even simpler to deploy, and to enhance its value. We will show how you can reach the promised five-second range latency by relying on Ateme’s end-to-end OTT video delivery—today. What is latency anyway? Before we start, let’s define latency. Latency is the time it takes for video content to go from the camera to your screen. This delay is introduced by the different stages required to process and deliver video content within the streaming pipeline. Some components are already operating very close to their physical limit, i.e. the speed of light, with sub-millisecond processing delays at the sending and the receiving end. Other components, such as the video encoder, come in different versions, many of which include low-latency options to reduce the delay between the last input pixel and the first encoded byte. Typical broadcast linear stream delay ranges anywhere from five to ten seconds, whereas OTT multi-screen video delivery has historically been anywhere from 30 seconds to over technical Strategies for removing the final barriers