Streaming Delay and Attendee Experience
Understanding Streaming Media Technologies
Webcast streaming-as-a-service infrastructure is built on HTTPS Live Streaming (HLS) protocols. HLS streaming is currently the most widely used live streaming format. YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, and countless other companies use HLS to deliver live streaming video content.
HLS protocol breaks up the video signal into smaller fragments, which are downloaded by the attendee and reassembled into video. This delivery method allows for video to travel networks via “standard” web traffic, rather than real-time protocols which require specialized forms of web traffic.
Webcasting and Meeting Tool architecture
The difference between webcasting and meeting tools is best expressed as the difference between “Many-to-Many” vs “One-to-Many” services. Many-to-Many services are meeting tools where all users communicate with each other in real-time, while One-to-Many tools are built as broadcasts from a set of defined speakers to a large audience.
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Many-to-Many |
One-to-Many We use the HLS streaming protocol to deliver streaming content to global audiences at scale. Attendees to our events require no additional software or network rules. |
Attendee Experience
The HTTPS Live Streaming (HLS) protocol’s delivery method is built for reliable, scalable content delivery. This scalability introduces latency from what is occurring in real-time. This latency can vary anywhere between 10 - 25 seconds depending on your network connection.
The webcasting platform is built to deliver live video streaming content with our interactive features taking into account this delivery latency. When a slide is changed, and when a speaker addresses that slide, these are delivered to the attendee together as if they occurred in real-time. For the attendee, there is no perceived delay. To avoid confusion, we recommend that speakers do not join the attendee side of the tool.