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0 pointsmichaelt1y ago0 comments

Latency is somewhat important for huge sporting events; you don't want every tense moment spoiled by the cheers of your neighbours whose feed is 20 seconds ahead.

With on-demand you can push the episodes out through your entire CDN at your leisure. It doesn't matter if some bottleneck means it takes 2 hours to distribute a 1 hour show worldwide, if you're distributing it the day before. And if you want to test, or find something that needs fixing? You've got plenty of time.

And on-demand viewers can trickle in gradually - so if clients have to contact your DRM servers for a new key every 15 minutes, they won't all be doing it at the same moment.

And if you did have a brief hiccup with your DRM servers - could you rely on the code quality of abandonware Smart TV clients to save you?

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MBCook1y ago

That has been a big problem for football, especially things like the Super Bowl.

People using over the air antennas get it “live“. Getting it from cable or a streaming service meant anywhere between a few seconds and over a minute of delay.

It was absolutely common to have a friend text you about something that just happened when you haven’t even seen it yet.

You can’t even say that $some_service is fast, some of them vary over 60 seconds just between their own users.

https://www.phenixrts.com/resource/super-bowl-2024

omnee1y ago

Latency between the live TV signal for my neighbours and the BBC iPlayer app I was using to watch the Euro 2024 final literally ruined the main moments for me. It still remains an unsolved issue long into the advent of live streaming.

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