Author Archives: Will Law

HTTP Adaptive Segmented (HAS) streaming began to be used at scale from 2008 to 2012, with the advent of Move Networks, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HLS, Adobe HDS, and MPEG DASH. With the typical 10s segment durations of the day, livestream latencies (measuring latency as the time from an action being filmed to that same action being displayed on a device’s screen) remained in the 30s to 60s range, trailing broadcast by a significant degree. Over the next decade, segment durations were reduced down to 2s, bringing with them a concomitant reduction in latency to the 8s to 16s range. That range remains the typical latency for many live events today. The year 2020 then brought the industry a pleasant surprise — not one, but two HAS standards were released that target latency in the 2s range: Low Latency DASH (LL-DASH) and Low Latency HLS (LL-HLS). Both these standards were developed independently, and while they can be deployed as separate streams in a content delivery system, there are performance and cost gains to be had for packagers, origins, CDNs, and players if both streaming formats can be served by a single-set of media objects. Continue reading Using LL-HLS with byte-range addressing to achieve interoperability in low latency streaming→