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How the BBC and ITV are fixing delays on World Cup live streams

105 points by denzil_correa 8y ago

untog 8y ago
It's really interesting to see the tech being deployed to fix this problem. But it also amazes me how complicated we've managed to make things. In the UK in particular - just a few years ago the vast majority of people received their TV through over-the-air broadcast. It's instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking. Sports are a good test case, not just for latency but sheer demand. I worry that we'll face some kind of natural disaster in the not too distant future that'll make us wonder why we abandoned the resilience of OTA broadcast.
- djhworld 8y ago
  The interesting element of the online streaming is the rise of people watching on their phones/tablets, where getting a traditional OTA signal isn't possible.
  - sova 8y ago
    In Japan many cell phones have antennas to pick up OTA signals
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      Korea, too. Probably some other countries. I remember the PSP had an optional OTA antenna. There have been several attempts at doing the same thing in the U.S., but none of them ever worked out for various reasons. Often it was because of the expense of upgrading the tens of thousands of TV transmitters across the country. This one died in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaFLO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaFLO In a small country with more centralized control of broadcasting and less territory to cover like Japan and Korea, it's much easier.
    - sushid 8y ago
      Yup, I remember when I thought having my Motorola RAZR was the epitome of cool, people in Seoul would flip up their seemingly dumber phones and stream crystal clear HD TV in the subway.
      - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        For South Korea it's not normal HDTV but a special broadcast for mobile devices, DMB [1]. It was only recently updated to support 720p in favor of 240p. They aren't picking up the domestic ATSC signals. The Japanese mobile video system is a similar separate broadcast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_multimedia_broadcasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_multimedia_broadcastin...
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Indeed. And it's not good. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-44722812 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-44722812 Actors have vented their fury at two audience members who watched England's World Cup penalty shoot-out on their phones in the front row of a musical. Titanic The Musical actor Niall Sheehy said the women "not only followed the penalty shootout on their phone, but also said 'yesss' on each goal scored". He declared: "You are the most ignorant audience members I have ever had the misfortune to perform in front of."
    - jrockway 8y ago
      You're blaming technology for social problems. For every person that interrupts a play, there are 10 people quietly watching on their train home... turning wasted time into time enjoyed. Rude people are always going to be rude, and we shouldn't worry about the technology that enables them to do so. If they couldn't watch soccer during a musical, they'd just be coughing loudly or rummaging around in their pockets looking for a mint or having a too-loud "private" conversation with the person next to them. Phones have changed nothing.
      - comex 8y ago
        I’m not confident it’s actually true that “phones have changed nothing”. They’ve certainly increased the variety of distractions one can access from a theater seat, as well as the ease of accessing them. But it’s also clear that most people have enough self-control to avoid using their phones for the duration of a musical, so it’s reasonable to blame those who don’t rather than blaming the technology. (This is distinct from the longer-term phenomenon of phone addiction, where there’s more room to blame the technology’s addictive qualities…)
        isostatic 8y ago
        This is the same argument that people use about "don't blame guns, it's people that are the problem" Seems to me that theatres (and cinemas) should be putting passive farady cages to block signals coming in, I'd pay extra for that.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    Just a sidenote, there is really nothing preventing that techically speaking, after cellular signals are OTA, and handheld tvs used to be a thing.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Still do. While just over 1 million watched the last BBC england game on iplayer (before it crashed), at least 20 million were watching on BBC One. Everything else makes perfect sense to broadcast, but live -- especially zero-latency live -- over unicast http calls? Ridiculous. A shame the BBC's multicast trials never took off.
  - djhworld 8y ago
    > While just over 1 million watched the last BBC england game on iplayer (before it crashed), at 3.8 million according to https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/08/england-world-cup-win-sweden-watched-by-20m-bbc-tv-viewers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/08/england-world-...
    - isostatic 8y ago
      That's 3.8 total, not concurrently I.e. people tried iplayer, saw how crap the experience was (in this niche case), then found a TV or pub with TV to watch it on.
      - djhworld 8y ago
        Ah concurrents. In this case the stream went down in the last 5 minutes of the match, which is still bad, but not as bad as YouTube TV earlier this week! https://twitter.com/YouTubeTV/status/1017121393857556485 https://twitter.com/YouTubeTV/status/1017121393857556485
      - wayanon 8y ago
        Or found the pub was using iPlayer too..
  - blntechie 8y ago
    In India , we had a 9.7 million concurrent streams record recently for a cricket game with a service called Hotstar. The stream at least for me was ahead of Cable TV, not sure if they delayed the TV broadcast to account for live streaming delay to make it appear live.
- mpg33 8y ago
  Same with radio in cars. It just works.
  - mattacular 8y ago
    I love things that just work but it's a little unfair to compare radio technology that has been around for over 100 years and backed by huge public infrastructure investments with internet-based live streaming that has been around for (being generous) maybe 10-15 years at the most?
    - vokep 8y ago
      Not really when theres a good chance its ending up going through radio technology still anyways (wifi). And its a matter of complexity - its obvious why OTA would have less problems to solve in order to get the same performance and behavior of something more complex.
      - laumars 8y ago
        OTA doesn't have less problems to solve. You have all the same problems of digital encoders etc (since all the media is digital anyway) PLUS the problems of transmission towers, solar events (I kid you not), wildlife, etc. You have the safety and cost problems supporting those hazardous and highly expensive equipment in remote locations. IP streaming does actually solve a lot of problems. Plus these days OTA transmissions are all digital anyway. So serving that digital content via the internet is a natural progression. Sure things are superficially more complex at the moment but the technology hasn't matured yet.
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      maybe 10-15 years at the most 21 years ago, we learned to hate the word "Buffering..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks
      - isostatic 8y ago
- philjohn 8y ago
  The problem is we only have a finite amount of spectrum available, and people like choice, so there are more channels than there are slots in the airwaves for them to be broadcast. Just like the phones in the UK will, in the not too distant future, move from POTS to a fully packet switched network, so too will television, especially once at least superfast (24Mbps and up) broadband is available to all - there are already rumblings that Sky would like to move to IPTV instead of having to bounce their signals off a satellite.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    As is so often the case in life, it's a case of squeezing a balloon. In order to get more of one thing, you have to have less of another. In this case, to have more reliability in transmission, you have to have fewer choices. I can't speak to the UK's digital situation, but in the U.S. there are 50 channels available in a theoretical city. Assuming that digital has fewer co-channel issues than analog (most of my TV experience is analog), that means 25 signals. On those 25 signals, some broadcasters squeeze up to 10 channels, which all look like garbage. For a decent picture, it's closer to four — maybe five. So that means 100 to 125 theoretical OTA channels. If people could actually receive 125 OTA channels with good programming on them, or even the same content as is offered on cable/satellite, I believe many would drop pay TV in a heartbeat, and wouldn't be forced to also scrounge for content on Netflix and YouTube and Prime Video. If anyone has information on the theoretical maximum number of TV channels possible in a single location in the UK, I'd like to hear about it.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      I’d be shocked if 125 good channels would convince people to give up on-demand streaming services. 125 really is not a whole lot when you need to satisfy everybody, and the need to obey someone else’s schedule really sucks.
- outworlder 8y ago
  Indeed, that's a bit silly. WE are calling these things 'broadcast', while most implementations are really unicast. This works really great for things like netflix, where you can start watching whatever you want, independently. But in this case we really want actual broadcasts. Talk about square pegs and round holes...
  - harlanji 8y ago
    VOD = video on demand, unicast is good. Live = stream, multicast is good. The 1.5 second multicast estimate for next Olympics from BBC sounds reasonable based on my experience working with signalling and now live straming systems. Good read around the steps and impact around buffering introducing delay. My programmer brain said “sounds like the receiver should control flow into its encoder”... so is it that it’s too conservative a buffer, or the encoding algorighms actually need that much buffer to get economy?
    - isostatic 8y ago
      With PPP encoding you can get end to end h264 latency down to 7 or 8 frames while maintaining a cracking picture quality.
- mattmanser 8y ago
  That's not true in some ways, TV requires a huge number of transmitters and is limited to a few channels, where the internet has a virtually infinite number of channels. Even now it's digital here in the UK I believe each of the 5(?) muxes can only support tens of channel each. Airwaves TV might scale easily but can only send a proportionally small amount of information, but the internet send a vastly larger amount of data per second, but struggles when everyone wants the same data at once.
- laumars 8y ago
  I don't disagree with your point per se but you are over simplifying things. Here is my take after working in the industry: > It's instant It isn't. There are still latency delays with digital encoders, transmitter hops, etc even with OTA signals. It's just the equipment has gotten so good over the years that the latency has been pushed right down but it did used to be a lot worse. The same will happen with IP streaming given time. > scales infinitely It doesn't. You need geostationary satellites / multiple transmission towers, and all that only provides you a finite number of channels. In fact digital streams are actually much cheaper to scale up, which is why so many broadcasters are moving into this territory (and why I currently have a job) > kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking Superficially yes. But if you spend any amount of time around OTA broadcasters (as I have) you'll see there is a hell of a lot of complexity hidden from sight. In fact since OTA broadcasts are still digital streams served from content stored in digital formats, a lot of the technology used for internet streaming is the same for OTA broadcasts. So there is an argument for the simplicity of just serving that digital stream via IP rather than radio waves (or are you suggesting we go back to analogue as well? Because that also introduces a lot of complexity but of a different nature, like having to giant robotic cabs filled with hundreds of magnetic taps that all have to be wound to the right point; and a dependency on the postal service delivering those tapes since you now cannot just download assets from the content owners). I'm not saying there isn't a lot of new complexity with IP streaming but I do think it's more pronounced because: 1/ we work in IT so follow the technology more closely than we do for OTA broadcasting 2/ it's still a relatively young industry so there are a lot warts that haven't been cleaned up (much like how OTA broadcasting used to be a lot less polished when the technology there was still evolving).
  - adreamingsoul 8y ago
    Well said.
  - skellera 8y ago
    I believe they were referring to number of receivers of the broadcast for scale. Distance from the tower being the limitation.
    - 8y ago
- 21 8y ago
  > It's instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking. I'm not so sure. When I had analog over-the-air TV, in a non-capital city, I remember quite a few times when most of the channels would go down during a storm.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > just a few years ago the vast majority of people received their TV through over-the-air broadcast. It's instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking "Scales infinitely" is underspecified. Over-the-air broadcast scales well with the number of people who want to receive a particular broadcast. It scales very poorly on some other dimensions: - Over-the-air suffers from congestion when many parties want to send a broadcast simultaneously. There's only so much spectrum. In a wired network, you can just add more wires. - Over-the-air doesn't scale well at all when people want to receive the same broadcast from farther away. In a wired network, you can use longer wires, or relay data from one wire to another wire. (Relays will work for wireless too, but they make congestion that much worse.)
isostatic 8y ago
30 seconds? 1 minute 40 -- that's the time from the neighbours shouting and the goal going in -- on iphone, on mac/chrome, and on LG TV It's hilarious.
- sova 8y ago
  Haha, sounds like the conditions are perfect for becoming a last minute bookie.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    I snuck an earlier feed via good old fashioned RTP (for testing purposes), and saw an england goal in the quarter finals 3 seconds ahead of them :D I was really looking forward to the final, especially if it went to penalities :(
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      I actually wonder why they don’t offer basic RTP streams. Sure, this new HLS thing is often better for mobiles and shit connections but when I’m on a 500Mbps connection in the office and want to watch the World Cup, couldn’t they just cut the HLS crap and give me raw RTP?
- Carioca 8y ago
  Wow, here in Brazil a 10-second lag is already unbearable... No matter where you are in a big city, you can hear the city erupt in different ways when the national team is playing
  - outworlder 8y ago
    10 seconds for the digital, vs analog broadcasts, correct? This article talks about the 'broadcast' over internet, which is even worse.
    - Carioca 8y ago
HNthrow22 8y ago
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here, BBC iplayer crashed during a ENGvSWE quarterfinal and YouTubeTV went down for 50 minutes during ENGvCRO just a few days ago. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-11/youtube-tv-goes-dark-for-an-hour-during-world-cup-semifinals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-11/youtube-t... https://news.sky.com/story/world-cup-fans-fuming-as-bbc-iplayer-crashes-minutes-before-end-of-sweden-game-11429541 https://news.sky.com/story/world-cup-fans-fuming-as-bbc-ipla...
- kurtisc 8y ago
  It says that in the first paragraph of this article.
ksec 8y ago
>"If you talk about the next FIFA World Cup or next Winter Olympics I think we will have a 1.5 second latency," Mohite says. "But getting it to zero is going to take another two to three more years of time." We know there is a roughly 5 to 6 seconds delay from Real life to TV Broadcast. ( Or may be from Betting company to TV Broadcast ) [1]. Which should have been enough time for OTT to catch up to OTA. Assuming if they could allow OTT to have 1.5 second head start of OTA. And to be honest I am very much surprised how unprepared all these OTT players were ( If you live in a country that was well prepared and offer low latency streaming, please forgive me ). As if they just discover 30+ sec delay in OTT delivery is going to be a big problem in World Cup. And this isn't as complicated as a Low Latency Live Streaming to Worldwide audience which requires much more complicated Edge and POP measurement and design, they are basically streaming to audience within their broadcasting right which is all regional. I have a hard time understanding why we cant do sub 8 seconds delay delivery today ( Compared to TV, not real life ). I think this is mostly due to manager and marketing department decide to throw in OTT as an added features for their customers to enjoy / upsell their package in the last minutes without fully considering, investing and testing their tech. We should have been aiming for 1.5 sec this World Cup. Not Next. P.S - I do agree with another comment about OTA broadcast. I just wish our phone could receive those signal without much compromise. Instead it seems the world is moving towards IP based everything. [1] https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/beating-the-broadcast-delay-world-cup https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/beating-the-broadcast-delay-...
- notahacker 8y ago
  I watched the England semi final on a pub outdoor TV with approx 1.5 second discrepancy in latency between screens in different areas of the courtyard (no idea of the technical setup which achieved this). Learning the outcome of a shot/cross just as you watch the ball being struck is particularly weird (quite fun when a free kick is scored, arguably worse than a longer lag the rest of the time as there's little mystery about when/how something will happen)
  - TillE 8y ago
    It would be odd if the same pub had more than one satellite/cable connection, so that's presumably to do with different decoders inside each TV. But 1.5 seconds is a long time!
lordnacho 8y ago
Whatever happened to multicast over the general internet? Seems like the perfect use case for it. Let the hardware do the copying instead of unicasting TCP connections or whatever it is they do.
- convivialdingo 8y ago
  AT&T did this for Uverse - it’s unicast for 5 seconds then it switches over to multicast. I assume there’s some key frames and h26x codec configuration that’s necessary. Unfortunately multicast doesn’t work across the internet. It’s typically filtered or ignored I think.
  - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
    That's correct. The unicast is there to catch up to the next multicast key frame and reduces the channel hop lag.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    Multicast works great across the internet but it fails because everyone uses NAT in their home.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      There's issues with wifi from memory. Not sure why multicast wouldn't work from behind nat, assuming the router supported it.
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  BT in the UK do this. It's awesome, but doesn't fix encoding delays like iPlayer is suffering from. Plus, it's over their Network which is a subset of the UK public internet infrastructure. I had an old blog page about how it was designed but I took it down. May be worth revisiting it. That said the general public prefer unicast so they can watch it when they want, which renders multicast a moot point.
  - 8y ago
httpz 8y ago
I've experienced the same problem 10 years ago watching the Olympics and I guess nobody solved it yet. Interesting thing is that 30 second delay is totally fine for 99.9% of the contents on TV except the games the whole country is watching. Anecdotally, YouTube TV had ~15 second delay and Fox Sports Go had ~50 second delay compared to what I see on the cable TV.
toyg 8y ago
I use the Forza ios app, and during the last few games I had to literally hide my phone to avoid its notifications. The lag was more than a minute on England matches. To be fair, apart from the lag and that crash at the end of one game, the BBC stream was a rock-solid HD, and it almost never buffered. ITV instead was low-res crap, stuttered all the time, and even had compulsory ads. Both streams got worse as the tournament neared the end, of course; in the first rounds the latency was only a few dozen seconds.
jeffrallen 8y ago
One typo in the lede and one a few scrolls later. Wtf, Wired, no copyediting?
zorked 8y ago
The easy solution would be to delay the TV signal by as much. This is only a problem during the world cup, and only because your neighbors will yell goal before you can see it. Delay artificially the TV and the problem is gone.
- cheeze 8y ago
  The problem is just flipped. Now internet users will spoil it for cable users. Good luck getting the cable companies to agree to a delayed signal.
- djhworld 8y ago
  The delay isn't fixed though, it's dynamic and can drift.
fomopop 8y ago
We tested this on the vMVPDs in the US (YouTube TV, DIRECTV NOW, Sling, etc.). https://www.fomopop.com/guides/live-tv-streaming/specs#live-delay https://www.fomopop.com/guides/live-tv-streaming/specs#live-... Most of the services were around 30 second delays, with the best being around 15 seconds and the worst around 60 seconds. At this point there needs to be a technology shift if its going to get any better than about 10 seconds. It even varies by device. iOS defaults to 10 second chunks, but you can reliably get it down to 6 seconds. You generally need to store at least 2 chunks or you'll have bad buffering.
stuartd 8y ago
Very noticeable when switching to radio, which was at least 30 seconds ahead of the broadcast signal, let alone streaming.
jscholes 8y ago
I haven't been watching the football, but I have been streaming another live event for the past two weeks: Wimbledon. My advantage comes from two things: I'm blind, and the BBC's CDNs have audio-only variants for every HLS stream. So I've been able to cut out the huge amount of bandwidth that would otherwise be consumed by streaming HD video, run the audio-only variants through FFmpeg and seek right to the end until the stream buffers. I'm usually ahead of the official Wimbledon live scoreboard, and the same coverage on cable TV, by a few seconds.
- blowski 8y ago
  Out of interest, why don’t you listen to the radio?
  - djhworld 8y ago
    Not all the matches are broadcast on radio
    - jscholes 8y ago
      > Not all the matches are broadcast on radio Yup, this sums it up. Now that we're in the second week of the tournament there are less matches to cover and the radio becomes a good option. Before that, there are too many good matches on outside courts to stick to the main action.
- stevetrewick 8y ago
  Mildly OT, as you’re a blind tennis fan, have you ever tried the adapted version of the sport for blind and partially sighted participants? If not, and you’re interested, I might be able to point you in the right direction depending on where you’re based.
  - jscholes 8y ago
    Sure, I played for a short while in Leeds. Good exercise but not enough opportunities to practice, leading to nobody really developing their skill unless they had the time and money to travel around the country to different clubs. Realistically there's not a lot to be done about that but I found it frustrating. Happy to hear if anything has changed since.
com2kid 8y ago
It is funny, they could feed it into Twitch and have a 5-10 second delay. An idea which makes me incredibly curious as to how well Twitch would handle that type of traffic!
dzonga 8y ago
I used illegal streams this world cup. They seemed to have sub millisecond latency i.e got the goals in near real time. Maybe, BBC & iTV should ask what the pirates are using.
- afterburner 8y ago
  Were they streams of Russian broadcasts?
- ec109685 8y ago
  How did you know?
- Rjevski 8y ago
  They’re most likely grabbing the feed directly from a TV tuner and then sending that over RTP. While it won’t be sub-millisecond, it’s definitely a lot faster than HLS.
davizao4 8y ago
With the amount of content that internet have, torrent of movies with incredible quality, beautiful documentaries, Netflix, youtube with your favorite tv shows, TV turned obsolete except from sports that are transmited live. So i feel like the main thing that tv has to got right its reduce to the maximum the delay time over quality of image.
not_that_noob 8y ago
It's not a problem that can be fixed. The endpoints - encoding at the transmitter and decoding at the device - can be with the efforts underway made somewhat equivalent between both modes. However, the problem is the path between them - the Internet was never built for realtime delivery of media streams. The many layers and devices along the route add delay, and on top of that network congestion can add more. Unless the path is more or less dedicated (as happens in broadcast, satellite or cable TV), there is no way to ensure realtime delivery. [PS Before anyone mentions RTP, this is a known problem with RTP - see: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp/faq.html https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp/faq.html "RTP does not ensure real-time delivery. So how come it is called a real-time protocol? No end-to-end protocol, including RTP, can ensure in-time delivery. This always requires the support of lower layers that actually have control over resources in switches and routers. RTP provides functionality suited for carrying real-time content, e.g., a timestamp and control mechanisms for synchronizing different streams with timing properties." ]
- ec109685 8y ago
  Plenty of things stream in real-time with high quality video and low latency, including video conferencing, FaceTime, YouTube live, etc.
saluki 8y ago
y, it's funny when watching NFL over the air if I tweet my friend about a TD he usually finds out from me since over the air is a few seconds ahead of what he's seeing on DirectTV.

105 points by denzil_correa 8y ago

It's really interesting to see the tech being deployed to fix this problem. But it also amazes me how complicated we've managed to make things. In the UK in particular - just a few years ago the vast majority of people received their TV through over-the-air broadcast. It's instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking. Sports are a good test case, not just for latency but sheer demand. I worry that we'll face some kind of natural disaster in the not too distant future that'll make us wonder why we abandoned the resilience of OTA broadcast.

djhworld 8y ago
The interesting element of the online streaming is the rise of people watching on their phones/tablets, where getting a traditional OTA signal isn't possible.
- sova 8y ago
  In Japan many cell phones have antennas to pick up OTA signals
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Korea, too. Probably some other countries. I remember the PSP had an optional OTA antenna. There have been several attempts at doing the same thing in the U.S., but none of them ever worked out for various reasons. Often it was because of the expense of upgrading the tens of thousands of TV transmitters across the country. This one died in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaFLO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaFLO In a small country with more centralized control of broadcasting and less territory to cover like Japan and Korea, it's much easier.
  - sushid 8y ago
    Yup, I remember when I thought having my Motorola RAZR was the epitome of cool, people in Seoul would flip up their seemingly dumber phones and stream crystal clear HD TV in the subway.
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      For South Korea it's not normal HDTV but a special broadcast for mobile devices, DMB [1]. It was only recently updated to support 720p in favor of 240p. They aren't picking up the domestic ATSC signals. The Japanese mobile video system is a similar separate broadcast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_multimedia_broadcasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_multimedia_broadcastin...
- isostatic 8y ago
  Indeed. And it's not good. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-44722812 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-44722812 Actors have vented their fury at two audience members who watched England's World Cup penalty shoot-out on their phones in the front row of a musical. Titanic The Musical actor Niall Sheehy said the women "not only followed the penalty shootout on their phone, but also said 'yesss' on each goal scored". He declared: "You are the most ignorant audience members I have ever had the misfortune to perform in front of."
  - jrockway 8y ago
    You're blaming technology for social problems. For every person that interrupts a play, there are 10 people quietly watching on their train home... turning wasted time into time enjoyed. Rude people are always going to be rude, and we shouldn't worry about the technology that enables them to do so. If they couldn't watch soccer during a musical, they'd just be coughing loudly or rummaging around in their pockets looking for a mint or having a too-loud "private" conversation with the person next to them. Phones have changed nothing.
    - comex 8y ago
      I’m not confident it’s actually true that “phones have changed nothing”. They’ve certainly increased the variety of distractions one can access from a theater seat, as well as the ease of accessing them. But it’s also clear that most people have enough self-control to avoid using their phones for the duration of a musical, so it’s reasonable to blame those who don’t rather than blaming the technology. (This is distinct from the longer-term phenomenon of phone addiction, where there’s more room to blame the technology’s addictive qualities…)
      - isostatic 8y ago
        This is the same argument that people use about "don't blame guns, it's people that are the problem" Seems to me that theatres (and cinemas) should be putting passive farady cages to block signals coming in, I'd pay extra for that.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  Just a sidenote, there is really nothing preventing that techically speaking, after cellular signals are OTA, and handheld tvs used to be a thing.
isostatic 8y ago
Still do. While just over 1 million watched the last BBC england game on iplayer (before it crashed), at least 20 million were watching on BBC One. Everything else makes perfect sense to broadcast, but live -- especially zero-latency live -- over unicast http calls? Ridiculous. A shame the BBC's multicast trials never took off.
- djhworld 8y ago
  > While just over 1 million watched the last BBC england game on iplayer (before it crashed), at 3.8 million according to https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/08/england-world-cup-win-sweden-watched-by-20m-bbc-tv-viewers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/08/england-world-...
  - isostatic 8y ago
    That's 3.8 total, not concurrently I.e. people tried iplayer, saw how crap the experience was (in this niche case), then found a TV or pub with TV to watch it on.
    - djhworld 8y ago
      Ah concurrents. In this case the stream went down in the last 5 minutes of the match, which is still bad, but not as bad as YouTube TV earlier this week! https://twitter.com/YouTubeTV/status/1017121393857556485 https://twitter.com/YouTubeTV/status/1017121393857556485
    - wayanon 8y ago
      Or found the pub was using iPlayer too..
- blntechie 8y ago
  In India , we had a 9.7 million concurrent streams record recently for a cricket game with a service called Hotstar. The stream at least for me was ahead of Cable TV, not sure if they delayed the TV broadcast to account for live streaming delay to make it appear live.
mpg33 8y ago
Same with radio in cars. It just works.
- mattacular 8y ago
  I love things that just work but it's a little unfair to compare radio technology that has been around for over 100 years and backed by huge public infrastructure investments with internet-based live streaming that has been around for (being generous) maybe 10-15 years at the most?
  - vokep 8y ago
    Not really when theres a good chance its ending up going through radio technology still anyways (wifi). And its a matter of complexity - its obvious why OTA would have less problems to solve in order to get the same performance and behavior of something more complex.
    - laumars 8y ago
      OTA doesn't have less problems to solve. You have all the same problems of digital encoders etc (since all the media is digital anyway) PLUS the problems of transmission towers, solar events (I kid you not), wildlife, etc. You have the safety and cost problems supporting those hazardous and highly expensive equipment in remote locations. IP streaming does actually solve a lot of problems. Plus these days OTA transmissions are all digital anyway. So serving that digital content via the internet is a natural progression. Sure things are superficially more complex at the moment but the technology hasn't matured yet.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    maybe 10-15 years at the most 21 years ago, we learned to hate the word "Buffering..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks
    - isostatic 8y ago
philjohn 8y ago
The problem is we only have a finite amount of spectrum available, and people like choice, so there are more channels than there are slots in the airwaves for them to be broadcast. Just like the phones in the UK will, in the not too distant future, move from POTS to a fully packet switched network, so too will television, especially once at least superfast (24Mbps and up) broadband is available to all - there are already rumblings that Sky would like to move to IPTV instead of having to bounce their signals off a satellite.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  As is so often the case in life, it's a case of squeezing a balloon. In order to get more of one thing, you have to have less of another. In this case, to have more reliability in transmission, you have to have fewer choices. I can't speak to the UK's digital situation, but in the U.S. there are 50 channels available in a theoretical city. Assuming that digital has fewer co-channel issues than analog (most of my TV experience is analog), that means 25 signals. On those 25 signals, some broadcasters squeeze up to 10 channels, which all look like garbage. For a decent picture, it's closer to four — maybe five. So that means 100 to 125 theoretical OTA channels. If people could actually receive 125 OTA channels with good programming on them, or even the same content as is offered on cable/satellite, I believe many would drop pay TV in a heartbeat, and wouldn't be forced to also scrounge for content on Netflix and YouTube and Prime Video. If anyone has information on the theoretical maximum number of TV channels possible in a single location in the UK, I'd like to hear about it.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    I’d be shocked if 125 good channels would convince people to give up on-demand streaming services. 125 really is not a whole lot when you need to satisfy everybody, and the need to obey someone else’s schedule really sucks.
outworlder 8y ago
Indeed, that's a bit silly. WE are calling these things 'broadcast', while most implementations are really unicast. This works really great for things like netflix, where you can start watching whatever you want, independently. But in this case we really want actual broadcasts. Talk about square pegs and round holes...
- harlanji 8y ago
  VOD = video on demand, unicast is good. Live = stream, multicast is good. The 1.5 second multicast estimate for next Olympics from BBC sounds reasonable based on my experience working with signalling and now live straming systems. Good read around the steps and impact around buffering introducing delay. My programmer brain said “sounds like the receiver should control flow into its encoder”... so is it that it’s too conservative a buffer, or the encoding algorighms actually need that much buffer to get economy?
  - isostatic 8y ago
    With PPP encoding you can get end to end h264 latency down to 7 or 8 frames while maintaining a cracking picture quality.
mattmanser 8y ago
That's not true in some ways, TV requires a huge number of transmitters and is limited to a few channels, where the internet has a virtually infinite number of channels. Even now it's digital here in the UK I believe each of the 5(?) muxes can only support tens of channel each. Airwaves TV might scale easily but can only send a proportionally small amount of information, but the internet send a vastly larger amount of data per second, but struggles when everyone wants the same data at once.
laumars 8y ago
I don't disagree with your point per se but you are over simplifying things. Here is my take after working in the industry: > It's instant It isn't. There are still latency delays with digital encoders, transmitter hops, etc even with OTA signals. It's just the equipment has gotten so good over the years that the latency has been pushed right down but it did used to be a lot worse. The same will happen with IP streaming given time. > scales infinitely It doesn't. You need geostationary satellites / multiple transmission towers, and all that only provides you a finite number of channels. In fact digital streams are actually much cheaper to scale up, which is why so many broadcasters are moving into this territory (and why I currently have a job) > kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking Superficially yes. But if you spend any amount of time around OTA broadcasters (as I have) you'll see there is a hell of a lot of complexity hidden from sight. In fact since OTA broadcasts are still digital streams served from content stored in digital formats, a lot of the technology used for internet streaming is the same for OTA broadcasts. So there is an argument for the simplicity of just serving that digital stream via IP rather than radio waves (or are you suggesting we go back to analogue as well? Because that also introduces a lot of complexity but of a different nature, like having to giant robotic cabs filled with hundreds of magnetic taps that all have to be wound to the right point; and a dependency on the postal service delivering those tapes since you now cannot just download assets from the content owners). I'm not saying there isn't a lot of new complexity with IP streaming but I do think it's more pronounced because: 1/ we work in IT so follow the technology more closely than we do for OTA broadcasting 2/ it's still a relatively young industry so there are a lot warts that haven't been cleaned up (much like how OTA broadcasting used to be a lot less polished when the technology there was still evolving).
- adreamingsoul 8y ago
  Well said.
- skellera 8y ago
  I believe they were referring to number of receivers of the broadcast for scale. Distance from the tower being the limitation.
  - 8y ago
21 8y ago
> It's instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking. I'm not so sure. When I had analog over-the-air TV, in a non-capital city, I remember quite a few times when most of the channels would go down during a storm.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> just a few years ago the vast majority of people received their TV through over-the-air broadcast. It's instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking "Scales infinitely" is underspecified. Over-the-air broadcast scales well with the number of people who want to receive a particular broadcast. It scales very poorly on some other dimensions: - Over-the-air suffers from congestion when many parties want to send a broadcast simultaneously. There's only so much spectrum. In a wired network, you can just add more wires. - Over-the-air doesn't scale well at all when people want to receive the same broadcast from farther away. In a wired network, you can use longer wires, or relay data from one wire to another wire. (Relays will work for wireless too, but they make congestion that much worse.)

isostatic 8y ago

30 seconds? 1 minute 40 -- that's the time from the neighbours shouting and the goal going in -- on iphone, on mac/chrome, and on LG TV It's hilarious.

sova 8y ago
Haha, sounds like the conditions are perfect for becoming a last minute bookie.
- isostatic 8y ago
  I snuck an earlier feed via good old fashioned RTP (for testing purposes), and saw an england goal in the quarter finals 3 seconds ahead of them :D I was really looking forward to the final, especially if it went to penalities :(
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    I actually wonder why they don’t offer basic RTP streams. Sure, this new HLS thing is often better for mobiles and shit connections but when I’m on a 500Mbps connection in the office and want to watch the World Cup, couldn’t they just cut the HLS crap and give me raw RTP?
Carioca 8y ago
Wow, here in Brazil a 10-second lag is already unbearable... No matter where you are in a big city, you can hear the city erupt in different ways when the national team is playing
- outworlder 8y ago
  10 seconds for the digital, vs analog broadcasts, correct? This article talks about the 'broadcast' over internet, which is even worse.
  - Carioca 8y ago

HNthrow22 8y ago

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here, BBC iplayer crashed during a ENGvSWE quarterfinal and YouTubeTV went down for 50 minutes during ENGvCRO just a few days ago. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-11/youtube-tv-goes-dark-for-an-hour-during-world-cup-semifinals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-11/youtube-t... https://news.sky.com/story/world-cup-fans-fuming-as-bbc-iplayer-crashes-minutes-before-end-of-sweden-game-11429541 https://news.sky.com/story/world-cup-fans-fuming-as-bbc-ipla...

kurtisc 8y ago
It says that in the first paragraph of this article.

ksec 8y ago

>"If you talk about the next FIFA World Cup or next Winter Olympics I think we will have a 1.5 second latency," Mohite says. "But getting it to zero is going to take another two to three more years of time." We know there is a roughly 5 to 6 seconds delay from Real life to TV Broadcast. ( Or may be from Betting company to TV Broadcast ) [1]. Which should have been enough time for OTT to catch up to OTA. Assuming if they could allow OTT to have 1.5 second head start of OTA. And to be honest I am very much surprised how unprepared all these OTT players were ( If you live in a country that was well prepared and offer low latency streaming, please forgive me ). As if they just discover 30+ sec delay in OTT delivery is going to be a big problem in World Cup. And this isn't as complicated as a Low Latency Live Streaming to Worldwide audience which requires much more complicated Edge and POP measurement and design, they are basically streaming to audience within their broadcasting right which is all regional. I have a hard time understanding why we cant do sub 8 seconds delay delivery today ( Compared to TV, not real life ). I think this is mostly due to manager and marketing department decide to throw in OTT as an added features for their customers to enjoy / upsell their package in the last minutes without fully considering, investing and testing their tech. We should have been aiming for 1.5 sec this World Cup. Not Next. P.S - I do agree with another comment about OTA broadcast. I just wish our phone could receive those signal without much compromise. Instead it seems the world is moving towards IP based everything. [1] https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/beating-the-broadcast-delay-world-cup https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/beating-the-broadcast-delay-...

notahacker 8y ago
I watched the England semi final on a pub outdoor TV with approx 1.5 second discrepancy in latency between screens in different areas of the courtyard (no idea of the technical setup which achieved this). Learning the outcome of a shot/cross just as you watch the ball being struck is particularly weird (quite fun when a free kick is scored, arguably worse than a longer lag the rest of the time as there's little mystery about when/how something will happen)
- TillE 8y ago
  It would be odd if the same pub had more than one satellite/cable connection, so that's presumably to do with different decoders inside each TV. But 1.5 seconds is a long time!

lordnacho 8y ago

Whatever happened to multicast over the general internet? Seems like the perfect use case for it. Let the hardware do the copying instead of unicasting TCP connections or whatever it is they do.

convivialdingo 8y ago
AT&T did this for Uverse - it’s unicast for 5 seconds then it switches over to multicast. I assume there’s some key frames and h26x codec configuration that’s necessary. Unfortunately multicast doesn’t work across the internet. It’s typically filtered or ignored I think.
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  That's correct. The unicast is there to catch up to the next multicast key frame and reduces the channel hop lag.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  Multicast works great across the internet but it fails because everyone uses NAT in their home.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    There's issues with wifi from memory. Not sure why multicast wouldn't work from behind nat, assuming the router supported it.
sofaofthedamned 8y ago
BT in the UK do this. It's awesome, but doesn't fix encoding delays like iPlayer is suffering from. Plus, it's over their Network which is a subset of the UK public internet infrastructure. I had an old blog page about how it was designed but I took it down. May be worth revisiting it. That said the general public prefer unicast so they can watch it when they want, which renders multicast a moot point.
- 8y ago

httpz 8y ago

I've experienced the same problem 10 years ago watching the Olympics and I guess nobody solved it yet. Interesting thing is that 30 second delay is totally fine for 99.9% of the contents on TV except the games the whole country is watching. Anecdotally, YouTube TV had ~15 second delay and Fox Sports Go had ~50 second delay compared to what I see on the cable TV.

toyg 8y ago

I use the Forza ios app, and during the last few games I had to literally hide my phone to avoid its notifications. The lag was more than a minute on England matches. To be fair, apart from the lag and that crash at the end of one game, the BBC stream was a rock-solid HD, and it almost never buffered. ITV instead was low-res crap, stuttered all the time, and even had compulsory ads. Both streams got worse as the tournament neared the end, of course; in the first rounds the latency was only a few dozen seconds.

jeffrallen 8y ago

One typo in the lede and one a few scrolls later. Wtf, Wired, no copyediting?

zorked 8y ago

The easy solution would be to delay the TV signal by as much. This is only a problem during the world cup, and only because your neighbors will yell goal before you can see it. Delay artificially the TV and the problem is gone.

cheeze 8y ago
The problem is just flipped. Now internet users will spoil it for cable users. Good luck getting the cable companies to agree to a delayed signal.
djhworld 8y ago
The delay isn't fixed though, it's dynamic and can drift.

fomopop 8y ago

We tested this on the vMVPDs in the US (YouTube TV, DIRECTV NOW, Sling, etc.). https://www.fomopop.com/guides/live-tv-streaming/specs#live-delay https://www.fomopop.com/guides/live-tv-streaming/specs#live-... Most of the services were around 30 second delays, with the best being around 15 seconds and the worst around 60 seconds. At this point there needs to be a technology shift if its going to get any better than about 10 seconds. It even varies by device. iOS defaults to 10 second chunks, but you can reliably get it down to 6 seconds. You generally need to store at least 2 chunks or you'll have bad buffering.

stuartd 8y ago

Very noticeable when switching to radio, which was at least 30 seconds ahead of the broadcast signal, let alone streaming.

jscholes 8y ago

I haven't been watching the football, but I have been streaming another live event for the past two weeks: Wimbledon. My advantage comes from two things: I'm blind, and the BBC's CDNs have audio-only variants for every HLS stream. So I've been able to cut out the huge amount of bandwidth that would otherwise be consumed by streaming HD video, run the audio-only variants through FFmpeg and seek right to the end until the stream buffers. I'm usually ahead of the official Wimbledon live scoreboard, and the same coverage on cable TV, by a few seconds.

blowski 8y ago
Out of interest, why don’t you listen to the radio?
- djhworld 8y ago
  Not all the matches are broadcast on radio
  - jscholes 8y ago
    > Not all the matches are broadcast on radio Yup, this sums it up. Now that we're in the second week of the tournament there are less matches to cover and the radio becomes a good option. Before that, there are too many good matches on outside courts to stick to the main action.
stevetrewick 8y ago
Mildly OT, as you’re a blind tennis fan, have you ever tried the adapted version of the sport for blind and partially sighted participants? If not, and you’re interested, I might be able to point you in the right direction depending on where you’re based.
- jscholes 8y ago
  Sure, I played for a short while in Leeds. Good exercise but not enough opportunities to practice, leading to nobody really developing their skill unless they had the time and money to travel around the country to different clubs. Realistically there's not a lot to be done about that but I found it frustrating. Happy to hear if anything has changed since.

com2kid 8y ago

It is funny, they could feed it into Twitch and have a 5-10 second delay. An idea which makes me incredibly curious as to how well Twitch would handle that type of traffic!

dzonga 8y ago

I used illegal streams this world cup. They seemed to have sub millisecond latency i.e got the goals in near real time. Maybe, BBC & iTV should ask what the pirates are using.

afterburner 8y ago
Were they streams of Russian broadcasts?
ec109685 8y ago
How did you know?
Rjevski 8y ago
They’re most likely grabbing the feed directly from a TV tuner and then sending that over RTP. While it won’t be sub-millisecond, it’s definitely a lot faster than HLS.

davizao4 8y ago

With the amount of content that internet have, torrent of movies with incredible quality, beautiful documentaries, Netflix, youtube with your favorite tv shows, TV turned obsolete except from sports that are transmited live. So i feel like the main thing that tv has to got right its reduce to the maximum the delay time over quality of image.

not_that_noob 8y ago

It's not a problem that can be fixed. The endpoints - encoding at the transmitter and decoding at the device - can be with the efforts underway made somewhat equivalent between both modes. However, the problem is the path between them - the Internet was never built for realtime delivery of media streams. The many layers and devices along the route add delay, and on top of that network congestion can add more. Unless the path is more or less dedicated (as happens in broadcast, satellite or cable TV), there is no way to ensure realtime delivery. [PS Before anyone mentions RTP, this is a known problem with RTP - see: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp/faq.html https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp/faq.html "RTP does not ensure real-time delivery. So how come it is called a real-time protocol? No end-to-end protocol, including RTP, can ensure in-time delivery. This always requires the support of lower layers that actually have control over resources in switches and routers. RTP provides functionality suited for carrying real-time content, e.g., a timestamp and control mechanisms for synchronizing different streams with timing properties." ]

ec109685 8y ago
Plenty of things stream in real-time with high quality video and low latency, including video conferencing, FaceTime, YouTube live, etc.

saluki 8y ago

y, it's funny when watching NFL over the air if I tweet my friend about a TD he usually finds out from me since over the air is a few seconds ahead of what he's seeing on DirectTV.