Red5’s Predictions for the Live Streaming Industry in 2024

Each year at this time, we like to look back over the past 12 months, reflect on changes to the industry, and celebrate successes. And then, just for fun, we make predictions about the next 12 months. In predictions for the live streaming industry in 2024, Red5 CEO, Chris Allen, and CTO, Mark Pace, revisited our predictions from last year, discussed the changes we’ve seen, and put on their fortune-telling hats for the upcoming year.

Highlights from 2023

• The launch of our new TrueTime Solutions™ WebRTC toolkit.
• Winning the Streaming Media Magazine Reader’s Choice Award for Best Live Streaming Service
• Launching our new website – https://www.red5.net/
• The honor of being a part of an innovative Accelerator Project at IBC.
• Joining forces with Nomad Media, Zixi, Videon, Singular, DirectAI, and TorkHub for a powerful TrueTime Solutions™ partnership.
• Continued partnerships with AMD, AWS, FLIR, and others as we revolutionize streaming in sports, news, surveillance, and entertainment.

Red5’s Predictions for the Live Streaming Industry in 2024

• Live sports engagement: Last year we predicted the rise of live sports fan engagement through the use of interactive video streaming tools. Things have exploded as the technology has taken off, and key stakeholders have started seeing value in building engagement in this way, particularly in the stadium and arena environments. We had the opportunity to work on a project involving a major sporting event earlier this year, and it’s exciting to imagine how this will continue to unfold in the future.
  
  In-stadium streaming is one of the biggest areas of growth here. At the beginning of the year, we’d hear people occasionally mention it, but now it’s coming up all the time. And this ties into our comments from last year about edge computing. 5G Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is quite literally changing the game in arenas and stadiums.
• Red5 Cloud: Red5 Cloud is our upcoming managed platform. Our customers have been asking, and we’re excited to see it launch. The intent was for it to go live in 2023, but we saw so much demand for our sports streaming solutions that we shifted resources to tackle those first. We’ll see the launch of Red5 Cloud in 2024 along with our Bantha Livestream.
• More Codecs: We didn’t see much change in this realm over the last year, but we’re anticipating a bump in High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.256) adoption with Apple’s introduction of the Vision Pro mixed-reality headset. The ability to livestream stereoscopic video has all kinds of interesting possibilities, such as experiencing your favorite sports from an immersive, first-person perspective. And, as Apple recently enabled stereoscopic video recording for the iPhone Pro, we’ll certainly see more people capturing 3D-friendly content.
• WHIP and WHEP: Last year we predicted the rise of the WHIP and WHEP streaming protocols. Most major encoder providers are either supporting or in the process of adding support for WHIP, and we’ve worked both protocols into our products. We expect that these will soon be fully mainstream.
• Social Media and ActivityPub: We thought (and rather hoped) that we’d see a shift in social media from the handful of dominant monoliths to a more open standard-based network of sites, such as Mastadon. That hasn’t panned out just yet, but things are still slowly moving in that direction. ActivityPub is seeing more adoption and WordPress just added support for it this year. Now every WordPress site can easily publish to the Fediverse.
• GovCloud: It isn’t terribly surprising, but movement to GovCloud is a slow process. We’re seeing some activity there – shifting traffic cameras online, for example – but high-level adoption may take a while. There is a lot of potential there for using our interactive, real-time video tools (with sophisticated security systems already in place), and we’re continuing to build capacity in this area.
• Artificial Intelligence: We discussed artificial intelligence last year and have been exploring potential uses in creating live video streams, but we’re still in the infancy of what’s possible. This past year has brought better tools for working with AI, so we expect to see even more development and stability in that area. We’re looking forward to integrating AI into our stream management, as well as other tools.
• Multiview Streams: We think multiview will become more prominent in sports. In addition to a live interactive multivew experience, we are expecting to see more delayed multiview streams synchronized within traditional broadcast settings. Red5 TrueTime MultiView™ for Production is a broadcast-friendly tool for the integration of multiple streams.

A few other things we’re keeping an eye on:

• VR, AR, and XR in sports: There are still some hurdles to widespread adoption here, but sports enthusiasts have a lot to look forward to in this arena.
• Streaming from space: With NASA’s high-speed laser link two-way communication system in play, we’ll be watching to see what kinds of opportunities open up.

Conclusion

Predictions for the live streaming industry in 2024 highlights how real-time video continued to mature in 2023 and where the biggest opportunities are emerging next. From in-stadium streaming and new codecs to AI, multiview, and evolving protocols like WHIP and WHEP, the blog outlines the trends shaping sports, media, and interactive experiences.

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