Now that 5G service coverage is reaching mass scales in the U.S. and other parts of the world, carriers have an opportunity to fuel demand for next-gen smartphones and higher speed connectivity by exploiting the power of real-time 5G live video streaming over their airwaves. Beyond throughput gains that range from 20% to 100x over 4G access rates, depending on the amount and type of spectrum used, 5G brings into play reductions in transmission latency that enable mobile network support for a wide range of applications that 4G isn’t suited for. These include consumer and commercial services that…

One of the great benefits distributors should expect from real-time streaming on an open standards-based cloud platform is fail-safe performance enabled by automated cross-cloud redundancy and other persistent-quality mechanisms. Robust performance has become a given of public cloud services, but all too often, failures still occur, whether as a result of network disruptions, server malfunctions or datacenter-wide breakdowns induced by power outages and other causes. Such occurrences are especially damaging in real-time live streaming situations, where, without recourse to instantaneous recovery, much of the value proposition is lost. Fortunately, thanks to ecosystem-wide adherence to open standards, it’s now possible…

For anyone wishing there was a way to meet bandwidth and latency challenges posed by 4K UHD and other emerging high bitrate video formats without having to wrestle with all the issues posed by next-gen codecs, here’s some good news: It looks like your wish has come true. Earlier this year, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) took major steps toward final approval of Parts 1 and 2 to MPEG-5, known, respectively, as Essential Video Coding (EVC) and Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC), and H.266, also known as Versatile Video Coding (VVC). All three standards are on…

Encoding vendors and their customers who are relying on playout of live-streamed video over Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) to CDNs as the best way to minimize latency actually can do much better if they want to achieve end-to-end distribution in real time. This may come as a surprise to those who believe they have gone as far as they can with use of SRT in the quest for ultra-low latency. But because SRT is strictly designed for the contribution leg of content distribution, the format has no impact on the latency performance over the rest of the path to end…

As providers of sports and other live-streamed video add safeguards against surging online theft, they have more reasons than ever to cut end-to-end distribution latency to the vanishing point. These new ways to secure live video streaming, introduced in response to pirates’ circumvention of protections provided by encryption, revolve around forensic watermarking. While watermarking can’t stop people from stealing and restreaming high-value video, invisible codes inserted into each stream by watermarking platforms optimized for live streaming make it possible to identify and take timely action against the sources of stolen content. When it comes to effective use of watermarking…

Real-Time, Synchronized Delivery of Live-Streamed Video with Personalized Digital Overlays Leads to more Compelling Service Engagements with Viewers As OTT providers of sports and other linear programming come under intensifying pressure to differentiate themselves, they have a ground-breaking opportunity to transform viewers’ experiences through unique use cases for interactive video streaming. Initiatives underway worldwide are demonstrating that service providers who leverage recent advances linking cloud-based feature enhancement with real-time streaming can enable far more compelling engagements with live-streamed content than ever before. The range of personalized features with options for interactivity is virtually limitless when graphics, video and text can…

Differentiation that Can Make All the Difference in a Crowded Marketplace With more esports events competing for attention more than ever is there still an opportunity to create an esports app that stands out? Absolutely. There’s plenty of room for innovation on the part of any producer who wants to gain an edge by offering users a much more engaging experience than they typically get from what amounts to a replication of traditional sports broadcasts with chat enhancements on the leading esports hosting platforms. Obviously, any esports production’s prospects for success begin with the game’s (or games’…

Production Playout Tie-In with Red5 Pro Achieves Unmatched Results End to End The prospects for streaming sports and other live event programming at ultra-low latency end to end are greater than ever thanks to the synergies between the Red5 Pro platform and SRT (Secure Reliable Transport). SRT is the protocol developed for video transmission over the Internet that is fast becoming professional video producers’ preferred conduit for linear output to distributors. Red5 Pro’s adoption of support for SRT enables distributors as well as producers pursuing direct-to-consumer strategies to seamlessly ingest SRT-packaged live streams into the Red5 Pro cloud distribution…

A Strategy for Minimizing Live Streaming Costs with Red5 Pro Anyone planning to use public cloud services to support live streaming at massive scales on the Red5 Pro platform has reason to expect the optimum solution will be one that’s least expensive. How can this be? Simple. As we all learned from economics 101, once we’ve found the solution we’re looking for, what we pay depends on our freedom to shop. Ever more OTT video service providers are discovering the best way to stream live content to vast audiences at sub-second latencies is to create their own…

Is there an Optimal Strategy for OTT Service Providers? Suddenly, it seems, we’re living in a CDN-alternatives universe. When it comes to streaming premium video, OTT service providers have taken matters into their own hands by leveraging new cloud-based platforms to get what they’ve been missing from public CDN providers. Whether or not they can find what they’re looking for is the question we’re addressing here. It wasn’t very long ago that one of the givens of the OTT premium video business was that you had to sign up with one or more CDN service…