@ozsat wrote:
This may be of interest - Why it’s so hard to fix lag on Euro 2020 live streams
Brilliant article! Very well explained. Especially this quote:
"The challenge there is that it really is a trade-off between quality of service and how quickly we can deliver it or how close to real-time you can deliver it: it’s a very direct trade-off"
In an attempt to please users, I reduced the latency on the Android app down to 12 seconds earlier this year. For many users, the response was brilliant - the video started faster, and users were that much closer to real-time. For the majority of users though, the effect was worse - a tiny amount of buffering was enough to throw players totally off kilter and the average buffering rate across all users shot up. We're set at 18 seconds (plus encoding overhead) on Android now, but other platforms don't have quite the same level of tweakability.
When you're delivering the video to thousands of different devices connected in different ways, with different signal strength, processing power, and screen size, there's an almost infinite number of things that can go wrong.
