It’s estimated that in 2022, live video and on-demand video made up 66% of global traffic. The top 10 days of internet traffic last year coincided with NFL coverage and the Mike Tyson fight as well. A lot of this is the result of streaming, which helps to connect millions of people to on-demand content across the world.
Major Challenges that Streaming Helps to Address
When it comes to things like video content, whether it is a live stream or even a pre-recorded video, there are a few challenges that have to be addressed. Video data is huge, which makes transmission difficult. Streaming also has to adapt to different devices and even internet capacities. Viewers who have lower-resolution screens or even slower speeds have to be able to access video, even if the quality of it is reduced. To tackle challenges like this, video providers have to implement different steps. The first step is to try and fragment videos into smaller pieces. This is also known as chunks. They then undergo coding and compression, which solves the issue of different resolutions.
It’s not just sports streaming that works this way, either. The same concept applies whenever you watch live videos on YouTube or stream live theatre shows through your mobile. Even when you stream live casino UK online games, you are connected to a real dealer in a studio setting. Games like Family Feud Live from Las Vegas often have multiple camera angles as well, but this is all fed through one connection to ensure smooth playback on your device. The video player on your device also assembles the data chunks in sequence to try and create a seamless viewing experience.
Delivering Content on a Large Scale
Delivering content on a big scale, whether it’s been prerecorded or live, is a challenge when you look at the sheer amount of content that is streamed across the globe. An approach could be to create a data centre that stores all the videos and content, so they could be sent out. This method isn’t that well favoured, though, as it comes with several challenges. A major issue with this comes down to geographical latency. If a data centre is in Manchester, UK, someone in London may not experience a delay, but someone in Texas would. As more viewers connect, the interconnecting networks could also become busy, resulting in delays with video buffering.
To address this, most content providers rely on networks. Networks like this distribute content through scattered clusters that all store copies of high-demand content, but on a local level. Not only does this reduce latency, but it also improves reliability as a whole. Akamai, Fastly, and Amazon Cloud all employ the Enter Deep approach, where thousands of nodes are used to ensure minimal latency. Bring home involves using large clusters with more strategic locations, showing how these can be used in conjunction with each other to deliver outstanding results with minimal latency while reducing the need for solitary data centres with high-tech equipment.
