IBC 2024 Prioritizes Live-Streaming Goals Perfectly Aligned with Red5

The 2024 edition of the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam marked a moment of transformation in live premium content production that was precisely in tune with the advances Red5 brought to light there.

Most notably, IBC continued the outpouring of AI-assisted advances that have been bringing cost-saving efficiencies to all types of professional production, from movies and episodic TV to sports, news and other live programming. But the event also uniquely highlighted what’s been missing from trade show demos and discussions when it comes to maximizing those efficiencies in remote live production scenarios.

This is where Red5 shined.

Demand for Remote Sports Production Intensifies

It’s easy to see why this show put more emphasis than we’ve seen previously on the need for remote production capabilities in live event streaming. The sports world after years of hesitation has fully embraced streaming in an OTT environment where cloud technology plays a dominant role in storage, distribution and, increasingly, production. As John Ellerton, head of futures & innovation at BT media & Broadcast noted during one conference session, “It’s clear we as an industry will move over the coming years from being a broadcast media to being something that is entirely OTT delivered.”

With this perspective taking hold, producers want to know whether they can enable remote collaboration in live production from any location. This is especially important but also immensely challenging for anyone who wants to eliminate the need for on-site production teams and apparatus beyond what’s required to capture the action.

Earlier this year, the National Hockey League became the first major pro sports enterprise to take the plunge into full cloud production with the elimination of big in-venue production vehicles. Speaking during a panel discussion at IBC, Grant Nodine, the NHL’s senior vice president of technology, made clear what the initiative has meant to transforming the league’s ability to enhance viewing experiences.

By orchestrating all the camera inputs delivered in a single feed to the cloud, the NHL can give fans “the tools to wrap the broadcast in our data” and choose “what kind of renditions do I want to make of that feed to give fans different views of the game,” Nodine said. Articulating a widely held aspiration among sports producers, he added this has allowed the league “to start diversifying our content in a way that reacts to the generational change in the way people consume media.”

Red5 Demonstrates Unique Capabilities in Remote Production

The Red5 team at IBC experienced firsthand how vital these capabilities are to live sports and newscasters as we met with producers from across the world who are looking for solutions. Many, including major sports leagues, are already well along in live production tests that are proving they can reach their goals using Red5’s TrueTime Studio for Production in conjunction with our real-time streaming platform. Now, with the show behind us, we’re working with many more to get such proofs of concept up and running.

This transition point in live production rests in part on the immense progress vendors in the production supply chain have made in development of content processing and management workflows that bring operations together on dashboards shared across far-flung workstations. With AI-assisted access to assets wherever they’re produced or stored, what once were time-consuming tasks are consummated with point-and-click efficiency, encompassing far more variations in the elements comprising content streams than was possible in past operations.

Some of the best cloud-based platforms were demonstrated by our partners, Blackbird, the supplier of a comprehensive video editing system, and Nomad Media, a leader in cloud-based asset management. Many other suppliers representing a who’s who of leading production and playout vendors promoted solutions supporting cloud-centric platforms targeted to producers of live programming.

It was clear the moment has arrived to put these capabilities to use in distributed production scenarios. What’s needed and what we uniquely demonstrated at content transport supplier Zixi’s stand, along with encoding partner Osprey Video and Blackbird, is the means to connect all production workflow end points in real time to enable simultaneous interactions among collaborators in the editing process.

As shown in our demo, which can be viewed here, and described in depth in a previous blog, our TrueTime Studio for Production toolset allows production personnel to work with an unlimited number of simultaneously displayed video feeds on conventional computer screens free of reliance on expensive purpose-built switchers, which typically lack the capacity to manage all the camera and other asset feeds now common to live productions. Red5 was able to demonstrate at IBC that not only are we the only supplier offering a solution that satisfies these requirements; we were putting them on display with real-time connectivity in all directions. Watch the demo below:

Real-Time Streaming Takes Center Stage

Of course, when it comes to real-time streaming, Red5 is supporting distribution as well as backend applications through its WebRTC-based Experience Delivery Network (XDN) architecture, which can be scaled to provide interactive video connectivity to any number of users at sub-250ms latencies worldwide. To our delight, one of the things that made this year’s IBC unique was the degree of attention focused on real-time interactive streaming for both backend and distribution applications.

There were more WebRTC platforms designed for M&E applications on display than we’ve ever seen at a major trade show. We considered the presence of all this competition a big plus in our efforts to get out the message that WebRTC-based real-time streaming technology has matured to where scaling, quality and other past issues have been surmounted. After all, with the opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of our XDN platform, it was better to be standing out in a crowd drawing great interest than to be the only one trying to draw a crowd.

Equally revealing as to the strategic importance of real-time interactive streaming in the booming live streaming market was the amount of conference time devoted to exploring the possibilities. Here, much of the focus was on the distribution side with panel session titles like “Scalable Ultra-Low Latency Streaming for Premium Sports,” “Building Live Experiences: Enhancing Engagement with Real-Time Interactions,” “A New Protocol Framework for Solving Network Congestion in Real-Time Streaming,” “XR-Advances in Capturing, Rendering and Delivering,” which featured a BBC paper exploring how to incorporate a live music event into a virtual environment, and, in a case of hype gone amuck, “Streaming at the Speed of Light.”

Comcast Team Demonstrates Latency Limitations in HTTP Streaming

Perhaps the most significant of these sessions, because it was led by Comcast, was the panel focused on ultra-low latency streaming for premium sports. Here the significance lay not only with the fact that the session revealed the high priority assigned to such capabilities by the biggest U.S. service provider. There was also great significance in what was revealed about the limits of trying to reach latencies over HTTP networks that come anywhere close to the latencies attained over Red5 XDN infrastructure.

Comcast and its IBC “accelerator project” allies, including the UK’s BT and technology suppliers ATEME (encoding), CastLabs (media player), VideoClarity (SDI connection), AMD (microprocessors) and HP (servers), detailed their success at achieving 1.8-second end-to-end latency with streaming of live sports in 4K. As explained by Comcast technology fellow Alex Giladi, the team through reductions in latency contributions from encoding, packaging, buffering and other points in distribution showed this could be done over HTTP connections that are interoperable with the dominant MPEG DASH and HLS streaming modes.

But the presentation made clear this was as far as they could get in the HTTP domain at the present time, notwithstanding the emergence of QUIC UDP transport, the default mode in HTTP/3, as a potential path to lowering latency over HTTP even further. Commenting on the “unfortunate” state of affairs with HTTP/3, Giladi said, “Right now, we just have an indication that at least we can shave off 50 to 100ms” from the 1.8-second results, which is not meaningful enough to act on.

That’s prompting another line of research. “Another interesting experiment is, what if we go and wrap all of our HTTP/1.1 traffic in an FEC tunnel and use FEC to go nearly end to end?” Giladi commented. So far, he added, “we’ve seen that this results in a pretty significant reduction in buffering times.”

Left unmentioned was the IETF standards initiative underway with use of QUIC, separate from HTTP/3, in the development of a new Media over QUIC (MoQ) protocol. The long multi-year timeframe needed to make MoQ commercially available, as discussed in a previous blog, probably accounts for the omission, which was notable since Giladi was co-author of a white paper on MoQ presented at last year’s IBC.

The Confirmed Approach to Real-Time Streaming

The bottom-line takeaway from the Comcast presentation is clear: there’s no way to reach the real-time sub-half-second latencies in sports streaming or any other application that are essential to delivering the interactive use cases live streaming producers are clamoring for. Giladi acknowledged such capabilities are now in reach over WebRTC platforms like Red5 Cloud. But he dismissed such options, commenting, “The difference between what you can get out of adaptive streaming and out of WebRTC is large but not large enough to justify wholesale change.”

We beg to differ. The Comcast demo was based in part on forthcoming 6^th edition updates to the MPEG DASH standard, DASH-IF Live Ingest acceleration and L3D DASH, which supports a 93% reduction in buffered segment lengths to enable nearly instant playback.

While these changes don’t require any kind of hardware forklift, to be meaningful they’ll require an ecosystem-wide packaging and device client software upgrade just to get to 1.8-second latency. Meanwhile, producers and distributors of live-streamed sports and other events who want to create a multidirectional video streaming template operating at 250ms end-to-end latencies can meet their goals simply by inputting their basic requirements in terms of audience sizes and reach on the Red5 Cloud dashboard. Our automated cloud orchestration system takes care of putting the required infrastructure in place.

As for “wholesale change,” that’s the name of the game now as the video transport traditionally provided by CDNs undergoes generational upheaval with transitions to cloud-based home-grown and vendor turnkey systems, including shared “open-cache” platforms. Implementing XDN nodes is simply another way to put the cloud to use in streaming transport.

And it’s also important to note that Red5 is working in an open-source standardized environment, not some proprietary domain burdened by the risk of vendor lock-in. When it comes to the need for any changes on the client side, there are none when the streaming occurs over the XDN platform, because WebRTC processing is supported by all the major browsers.

In the aftermath of the prominence given to real-time streaming at IBC we are more confident than ever that confusion about what needs to be done will soon give way to recognition that the solutions are already at hand. To learn more about how what everyone aspires to can be accomplished immediately with implementations of Red5 Cloud, contact info@red5.net or schedule a call.

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