Best Practices for Reducing Live Streaming Latency

As the popularity of live streaming has grown, it has become increasingly important to mitigate inherent latency in segmented HTTP streaming video. Many of the initial formats, such as HLS and MPEG-DASH, did not take into account the desire for synchronization between traditional broadcast and a streaming counterpart as live streaming had not yet taken hold. But as more major broadcasters and rights holders are pushing their live content, such as sports, through streaming platforms many of those formats (and others) have adopted low-latency modifications. Still, the format is but one piece of the entire streaming workflow and there are numerous other technologies and components which are not specifically optimized to reduce live streaming latency. It is critical to identify all of the technologies involved in streaming and understand where remediation or optimization can occur improve the overall latency of the streaming experience.