Delay in live sports

[alfiep212]

Signed up to BT Sport to watch CL games live, but to my surprise, there is a significant delay in the broadcast, around 40 seconds. Why is this and can it be fixed? If not, I am going to cancel, it's not worth paying £25 and still get this kind of delay in live sports, that's unacceptable

[DarrenDev · Accepted solution]

This is normal for internet "over the top" streaming I'm afraid @alfiep212
It's only a few seconds on the BT TV box (delivered over multicast) but internet streaming has a lot more processing to make it available to all devices at all broadband speeds.

[Les-Gibson]

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@DarrenDevwrote:
This is normal for internet "over the top" streaming I'm afraid @alfiep212
It's only a few seconds on the BT TV box (delivered over multicast) but internet streaming has a lot more processing to make it available to all devices at all broadband speeds.

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I have to disagree with you there Darren.

I have done a comparison between watching tennis on my laptop on Amazon Prime and watching it on the Prime Video app on my Youview box and my laptop is 45 - 50 seconds ahead of my Youview box.

As I'm sure you know, Multicast is not used in either case so why such a large time difference?

[DarrenDev]

Both of those will be behind the live stream though - one is just much further behind than the other.
How far a player is behind depends on the player, the platform, the implementation, and the distribution.
BT Sport is distributed in at least 10 different formats that I can think of off the top of my head - they each behave differently based on what the target hardware and software is capable of.

[alfiep212]

Yeah fine, I am not a tech expert, but the whatever the excuse is, this kind of delay is not worth £25 per month

[NigelB72]

@alfiep212 you do realise that sky is also behind in its live broadcast don't you? Every single sport that's broadcast live is slightly behind the actual live event by a few seconds. This is simply down to physics and until satellite uplinks, encoding and the downstream links work at close to the speed of lights it'll always be the case. . 

[alfiep212]

And do you realise that a 40+ seconds delay is not the same as a delay of "a few seconds" ?

[gomezz]

Curious as to *why* a transmission delay to live coverage is that important to you?

[alfiep212]

Because that's what I expect when I pay £25 a month. If 40+ seconds of delay is not a big deal, then why not 4 minutes, or 40 minutes, who cares as long as I get to watch the game, am I right?

[NigelB72]

@alfiep212 just out of interest, are you watching the enhanced feed with manager mode because that has a noticeable delay over the normal feed due to the additional encoding needed for the added features... The normal feed via the app is only a couple of seconds behind the Multicast channel on BT TV. I know this because I watch most games via the Youview box on the multicast channel but I watch the games in Ultimate because the Youview box doesn't support HDR