BBC Showcasing Ways to End Latency Between Livestreaming and Live TV

BBC R&D is using the International Broadcasting Convention show this week in Amsterdam to demonstrate how “new innovations” can eliminate the latency between an internet-delivered livestream and live over-the-air broadcast TV, said the broadcaster Wednesday. Fans watching World Cup livestreams this summer on the BBC iPlayer experienced lags of 30 seconds or more behind the live TV broadcasts, “with some complaining of hearing neighbours cheering goals that they hadn’t seen happen yet,” it said. Latency is prevalent with “vast majority of live video delivered over the internet” because it takes longer to send video over the net reliably than to broadcast it, it said. Though still in prototype, the low-latency techniques on display at IBC “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, so viewers shouldn’t expect the lag to disappear imminently,” it said. “Perhaps by the time they’re watching the next World Cup, viewers will be cheering at the same time, regardless of how they’re watching the match.”