Live streaming and latency

Latency - Live streaming

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U W

Latency:
The time taken for a return trip of data between two points.

Link:
The internet address (uniform resource locator) of a reference file. This hold information as to where a media stream is located, and how to access it.

Live streaming:
A broadcast that is happening in real time. Unlike terestrial broadcasting due to limited bandwidth, some cacheing and buffering occurs which means that there is generally a time lag of between 5 and 30 seconds during a live internet broadcast.

Live Streaming

When a live stream is sent from an encoder to a streaming server, the streaming server re-distributes it to the connecting clinets.

Dependent upon how the clients players are set up, they then store a small section of this stream in their buffer. This can be anywhere betweena couple of seconds on good connections up to about half a minute on poorer connections.

It is important therefore to realise that there is an inherent delay.

For mission critical streaming and to minimise time delays please contact us.

It is also worth noting that it is possible to runa simulated live webcast which consists of sending out a pre-recorded video at a set time as if it were running live.