VERITY BUTLER: What are some livestreaming solutions or scenarios that stand out to you as the most cutting edge?
JEAN MACHER: Mine may not sound especially cutting edge, but it’s something I was happy to see. That was the scale achieved at the last World Cup while retaining low latency. Things like UHD with HDR and low-latency streaming. We feel great satisfaction in the fact that this isn’t a proof of concept any more – especially with arguably the biggest international sporting event like the World Cup. To me, the cutting-edge aspect is not so much the capability of the solution, but the scale at which you have to run it. That’s an important trend in my eyes because the hope is that it’s going to trickle down to more sports in general – after those big tent-pole events. ADRIAN ROE: There are really interesting projects going on. Some national broadcasters are saying that every high school game should be available on TV. The idea being that rather than streaming five soccer matches on a Saturday afternoon, they might be streaming 2000 soccer matches on an app. Then they start to think: ‘Well, how am I going to do that?’ You have got to begin with an AI camera operator because you can’t send the camera crew to 2000 games on a Saturday afternoon, at least not economically. Then how do you make that a compelling experience? It’s technically extremely
FABIO GALLO: We launched LIV Golf+ a couple of months ago, which was the number-one sports app in the world for 72 hours. We had a couple of million app downloads in the first few days – which exceeded our expectations. The content was free, which is always a big help. The streaming service was good, available and scalable. Generally, I’m excited to see how artificial intelligence will continue to be applied to live streaming – used for automated video production, for personalisation or with chatbots to interact with viewers. SCOTT KIDDER: One of the things I’m most excited about in terms of livestreaming solutions is the opportunity to create feedback loops to the content creator around the quality of the feed that they’re pushing. Also, viewer engagement. Mux Video is sometimes used as a live-ingest video solution in another company’s product. That makes it important to be able to provide a feedback signal to the content producer about how their live-ingest stream is working. With Mux Video, we can push metrics about how the live ingest is performing, and our customer can then surface that information back to the video producer. You can also get viewership stats. All this is to say that data about how the live stream is performing ingest-wise is important, but it also helps understand viewer engagement. It’s about getting more data created around the live stream itself.
VERITY BUTLER: Having a good-quality, faultless live stream has moved from being a hope to a minimum expectation. How have you as vendors coped with that challenge? JEAN MACHER: When cloud streaming, you need to be protected from losing redundancy. If you lose a region, you need another platform in that region to seamlessly pick up the slack. That means there are a lot of challenges when moving into the cloud and then operating with broadcast quality. But, you can absolutely do it. You can build enough redundancy into your cloud platform to meet the requirements of a broadcast-quality live stream. It also has to do with making the right decision if something goes bad. That idea of having DevOps – people with plenty of automated tools to monitor what’s happening, but who also know what to do and have procedures in place. ADRIAN ROE: There’s an interesting element of circularity we are seeing. When Id3as was founded 13 years ago, all of our focus was on the cloud. What we’re seeing more and more are customers saying they’ve had a journey into the cloud that maybe started five to six years ago, which is fantastic for availability and scaling out. But we’ve then seen interest in taking a base use case and bringing that back into their own control. SCOTT KIDDER: Live streaming can be notoriously expensive and complex to operate. But there’s also a greater desire for people to produce and generate livestreaming content, especially in the UTC space. Being able to handle that increased number of live streams, economically, is a real challenge. It doesn’t necessarily directly relate to the broadcast space, but UTC content is now closing in on broadcast in terms of production and stream quality.
interesting – and socially extremely interesting. Because you are tapping into very committed but also very small audiences. “WE’RE SATISFIED THAT THIS ISN’T A PROOF OF CONCEPT ANY MORE”
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