Without a doubt, the streaming of live events to an audience is a transformative service in the realm of content delivery and has rapidly evolved in technological sophistication and adoption since its inception. An apt means to communicate with and engage an unparalleled size of a geographically dispersed audience, live event streaming services were popularized by events such as concerts, political debates, sports events, religious masses, and more, which were only attended by a limited audience physically present. Unquestionably, the Covid-19 pandemic has elevated the relevance of live streaming events as private and public sectors were forced to cancel live events in order to comply with health regulations and elected to host these virtually, with far-reaching impacts.
Live event streaming involves the process of broadcasting real-time video and audio recordings on internet protocols. When recording a live event, it is vital that the transmission between multiple devices is carried out efficiently to prevent any time delay or latency within the information flow. As a powerful communication tool, this service facilitates the ability for geographically dispersed peoples to have a shared experience and feel a more immediate connection with an online community whose interest, values, and lifestyle align with those of the event. Similar to an in-person event, a live-streamed event allows hosts to connect with people or communicate a message to an audience, albeit via a different communication medium. Given the amount of time people spend viewing online content, industries have wisely leveraged this practice to monitor brand performance, customer engagement, and to maintain close connections with their target market.
Technological Advancements in Live Event Streaming Services
Live event streaming services have expanded vastly due to technological advancements and have a range of functionalities that make streaming instantaneous. Initially, codecs such as H.264 were used for live encoding due to their better compression and reduced bandwidth requirements. However, software and hardware advancements have made encoding less computationally demanding and have led to better codec usage, such as the H.265 and VP9 codecs, which can use half the bitrate of previous codecs for the same visual quality. High resolution has also had an impact on quality, and Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR) can be used to stream in multiple resolutions to ensure the best performance on various media platforms.
In the last few years, ABR has penetrated the hosting market and made use of CDNs to simulate the behavior of linear television. New technological developments such as cloud-based solutions allow broadcasters to expand their reach enormously. In addition, integration of virtual reality into live streaming service has created a more immersive experience for spectators. Interactive solutions such as real-time rendering metadata, chat functions, voting, and various information services can be included in streaming platforms. In addition, cutting-edge companies use advertising to encourage viewers to buy their products, TV shows, and networks connected with the broadcasted live stream on various platforms to provide a sense of urgency, and empty stadiums have requested that fans upload a selfie to be ‘there’. The rapid expansion of this technology sector and its widespread adaptation can be further examined by looking at large media companies and how they facilitate live event streaming. A comparison of how these media companies expanded over time and how their developments widen the possibilities for the future of live streaming Singapore will also be discussed. Moreover, live video consumption through mobile devices has increased drastically, giving social media platforms the ability to launch live event functionality, such as Facebook Live and YouTube Live.
Key Players in the Live Event Streaming Industry
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Arguably one of the most important developments with respect to reducing streaming latency for live events has originated from CDNs. Akamai, now the “world’s largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform,” has long been at the helm of adapting its CDN networks in order to deliver live events quickly and with minimal latency. Alongside Akamai, Amazon’s CloudFront, Cloudflare, Google Cloud CDN, Limelight’s Orchestrate Platform, and Microsoft Azure CDN have each had to adjust how they deliver streamed content to viewers for all OTT platforms. For example, in 2016, Akamai introduced Media Services Live, a product offering live event streaming and linear TV capabilities. In 2017, they announced a new offering: Origin Experiences, a “likelihood” prediction service specifically designed for improving the live sports viewing experience by measuring a viewer’s chance of rebuffering.
Streaming Platforms
Although some OTT platforms operate as standalone streaming services, many have been launched by major sports leagues and media entities that are using access to exclusive sports rights to develop their direct-to-consumer offerings. They include ESPN+ and Peacock, both launched in 2020; DAZN, which has amassed multi-sport streaming rights in several territories; Discovery+, the home of the Olympics in Europe. A notable omission from that list is RSNs. Regional sports nets have in the past been reliant on exclusive rights deals with teams, and often have production and distribution agreements in place as part of those partnerships. Workout of those contracts, generally spanning multi-year terms, will obviously be an important factor in how much live event streaming they are planning. Alongside these STSs, notable major sports leagues, conferences, and rights holders that have been adapting to live event streaming include the National Football League, WWE, FITE, Facebook, Twitter, Major League Soccer, and the Professional Golfers Association (PGA).
Challenges and Solutions in Live Event Streaming
Despite the engagement and potential of live event streaming, it also presents several challenges to content providers. Edd et al. describe three key challenges for live event streaming. These include low latency in the presence of statistical multiplexing, efficient streaming in the context of variable bandwidth and wireless loss, and how to maintain quality of service (QoS) when a large number of users tune in for a live stream. Additional challenges include regulatory issues (e.g. some content can only be broadcast via satellite, radio or cable), the complexity and cost of coordinating and negotiating the rights between copyright holders and users, ensuring compatible set-top boxes and systems for legal compliance (e.g. geofencing and content blocking), and the legal aspects of providing a live streaming service provider (e.g. obligations on call centres and laws governing the prohibition of iGaming advertisements).
To reduce the effects of end-to-end delay, best practices for live event streaming include the proper use of Adaptive Bitrate (ABR), parallelization, and chunking. ABR is an innovative solution to the problem of bufferbloat, increasing the quality of user experience. Content providers and CDNs have proposed and implemented various solutions for live event streaming. Limelight Networks TRIM technology dynamically encodes content in the cloud, on a per-second basis for very low latency live events, while Edgecast has introduced a federated networking model in which all Edgecast shared services can act as surrogates in other networks. Meanwhile, Level 3 has developed a streaming platform with a focus on programmable, automated and self-configuring elements that take into consideration customer needs. Akamai’s improvements include the integration of multiscreen solutions to live DAI, enhanced APIs to better allocate resources for unpredictable customer demand, and a strategy for scaling services. Cloud-based technologies for simultaneous streaming to live television (Scrum) have also been introduced. Techniques and experimental results in chunking and parallelization are also presented in this literature.
The Future of Live Event Streaming
To project what we might see in a landscape like live event streaming just a few years in the future, we can assess the salient trends determining its current and short-term trajectory. It’s clear that changing viewing behaviors are gradually leading live streaming to a considerable increase in engagement thanks to real-time and interactive elements. And yet, a substantial amount of revenue for many kinds of live events is still derived from the physical and linear viewing experiences, making it difficult to anticipate just how pervasive live streaming events will become in the future. In most sectors, it will surely occur to some extent. Pre-pandemic reports indicated compound annual growth rates in the live events space of around 7-13% until at least 2025.
Both of these statistics have likely been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and Gartner estimates global digital festival revenue is now set to grow roughly 20% per year in 2020 and 2021. However, other industries, such as music and theater, have been very disrupted, and both the changed landscape and increasing user bandwidth are likely to facilitate cultural shifts in and aging up for live streams pending a potential vaccine and resumption of physical events. A number of trends and debates are likely to continue for a few years, where they will settle to some extent on a series of what are in many ways arbitrary choices e.g. dimensions and specificity of content, new technology like 5G and AR/VR not yet widely adopted, and many ticketed events that are not optimized for streaming revenue that will evolve to serve more niche audiences. The use of artificial intelligence, including machine learning for personalizing advertising, algorithms for curating content, and facial recognition for audience metrics, is further debated. The two most plausible long-term disruptions are technological: the advent of 5G could eventually render buffering obsolete and thus change the nature of online viewing, while more headset-like AR experiences might appeal to the video streamer who values novelty but is sick of VR/games/YouTube.
