
How the BBC and ITV are fixing delays on World Cup live streams - denzil_correa
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/england-vs-croatia-live-stream-bbc-iplayer-itv
======
jscholes
I haven't been watching the football, but I have been streaming another live
event for the past two weeks: Wimbledon. My advantage comes from two things:
I'm blind, and the BBC's CDNs have audio-only variants for every HLS stream.
So I've been able to cut out the huge amount of bandwidth that would otherwise
be consumed by streaming HD video, run the audio-only variants through FFmpeg
and seek right to the end until the stream buffers. I'm usually ahead of the
official Wimbledon live scoreboard, and the same coverage on cable TV, by a
few seconds.

~~~
blowski
Out of interest, why don’t you listen to the radio?

~~~
djhworld
Not all the matches are broadcast on radio

~~~
jscholes
> Not all the matches are broadcast on radio

Yup, this sums it up. Now that we're in the second week of the tournament
there are less matches to cover and the radio becomes a good option. Before
that, there are too many good matches on outside courts to stick to the main
action.

------
untog
It's really interesting to see the tech being deployed to fix this problem.
But it also amazes me how complicated we've managed to make things. In the UK
in particular - just a few years ago the vast majority of people received
their TV through over-the-air broadcast. It's instant and scales infinitely,
kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking.

Sports are a good test case, not just for latency but sheer demand. I worry
that we'll face some kind of natural disaster in the not too distant future
that'll make us wonder why we abandoned the resilience of OTA broadcast.

~~~
djhworld
The interesting element of the online streaming is the rise of people watching
on their phones/tablets, where getting a traditional OTA signal isn't
possible.

~~~
sova
In Japan many cell phones have antennas to pick up OTA signals

~~~
sushid
Yup, I remember when I thought having my Motorola RAZR was the epitome of
cool, people in Seoul would flip up their seemingly dumber phones and stream
crystal clear HD TV in the subway.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
For South Korea it's not normal HDTV but a special broadcast for mobile
devices, DMB [1]. It was only recently updated to support 720p in favor of
240p. They aren't picking up the domestic ATSC signals. The Japanese mobile
video system is a similar separate broadcast.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_multimedia_broadcastin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_multimedia_broadcasting)

------
lordnacho
Whatever happened to multicast over the general internet? Seems like the
perfect use case for it. Let the hardware do the copying instead of unicasting
TCP connections or whatever it is they do.

~~~
convivialdingo
AT&T did this for Uverse - it’s unicast for 5 seconds then it switches over to
multicast. I assume there’s some key frames and h26x codec configuration
that’s necessary.

Unfortunately multicast doesn’t work across the internet. It’s typically
filtered or ignored I think.

~~~
tinus_hn
Multicast works great across the internet but it fails because everyone uses
NAT in their home.

~~~
isostatic
There's issues with wifi from memory.

Not sure why multicast wouldn't work from behind nat, assuming the router
supported it.

------
ksec
>"If you talk about the next FIFA World Cup or next Winter Olympics I think we
will have a 1.5 second latency," Mohite says. "But getting it to zero is going
to take another two to three more years of time."

We know there is a roughly 5 to 6 seconds delay from Real life to TV
Broadcast. ( Or may be from Betting company to TV Broadcast ) [1]. Which
should have been enough time for OTT to catch up to OTA. Assuming if they
could allow OTT to have 1.5 second head start of OTA.

And to be honest I am very much surprised how unprepared all these OTT players
were ( If you live in a country that was well prepared and offer low latency
streaming, please forgive me ). As if they just discover 30+ sec delay in OTT
delivery is going to be a big problem in World Cup. And this isn't as
complicated as a Low Latency Live Streaming to Worldwide audience which
requires much more complicated Edge and POP measurement and design, they are
basically streaming to audience within their broadcasting right which is all
regional.

I have a hard time understanding why we cant do sub 8 seconds delay delivery
today ( Compared to TV, not real life ). I think this is mostly due to manager
and marketing department decide to throw in OTT as an added features for their
customers to enjoy / upsell their package in the last minutes without fully
considering, investing and testing their tech. We should have been aiming for
1.5 sec this World Cup. Not Next.

P.S - I do agree with another comment about OTA broadcast. I just wish our
phone could receive those signal without much compromise. Instead it seems the
world is moving towards IP based everything.

[1] [https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/beating-the-broadcast-
delay-...](https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/beating-the-broadcast-delay-world-
cup)

~~~
notahacker
I watched the England semi final on a pub outdoor TV with approx 1.5 second
discrepancy in latency between screens in different areas of the courtyard (no
idea of the technical setup which achieved this). Learning the outcome of a
shot/cross just as you watch the ball being struck is particularly weird
(quite fun when a free kick is scored, arguably _worse_ than a longer lag the
rest of the time as there's little mystery about when/how something will
happen)

~~~
TillE
It would be odd if the same pub had more than one satellite/cable connection,
so that's presumably to do with different decoders inside each TV. But 1.5
seconds is a long time!

------
HNthrow22
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here, BBC iplayer crashed during a ENGvSWE
quarterfinal and YouTubeTV went down for 50 minutes during ENGvCRO just a few
days ago.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-11/youtube-t...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-11/youtube-
tv-goes-dark-for-an-hour-during-world-cup-semifinals)

[https://news.sky.com/story/world-cup-fans-fuming-as-bbc-
ipla...](https://news.sky.com/story/world-cup-fans-fuming-as-bbc-iplayer-
crashes-minutes-before-end-of-sweden-game-11429541)

~~~
kurtisc
It says that in the first paragraph of this article.

------
isostatic
30 seconds?

1 minute 40 -- that's the time from the neighbours shouting and the goal going
in -- on iphone, on mac/chrome, and on LG TV

It's hilarious.

~~~
ajmurmann
It's super frustrating. My mother has ruined several matches this year by
emailing me results before I see them on the stream.

~~~
sv12l
Why did you open the email when you knew its going to be a spoiler? :)

~~~
ajmurmann
Because it popped up as a notification on my phone and the spoiler was the
terse subject line

~~~
sv12l
she is clever indeed.

------
httpz
I've experienced the same problem 10 years ago watching the Olympics and I
guess nobody solved it yet. Interesting thing is that 30 second delay is
totally fine for 99.9% of the contents on TV except the games the whole
country is watching.

Anecdotally, YouTube TV had ~15 second delay and Fox Sports Go had ~50 second
delay compared to what I see on the cable TV.

------
fomopop
We tested this on the vMVPDs in the US (YouTube TV, DIRECTV NOW, Sling, etc.).

[https://www.fomopop.com/guides/live-tv-
streaming/specs#live-...](https://www.fomopop.com/guides/live-tv-
streaming/specs#live-delay)

Most of the services were around 30 second delays, with the best being around
15 seconds and the worst around 60 seconds.

At this point there needs to be a technology shift if its going to get any
better than about 10 seconds.

It even varies by device. iOS defaults to 10 second chunks, but you can
reliably get it down to 6 seconds. You generally need to store at least 2
chunks or you'll have bad buffering.

------
toyg
I use the Forza ios app, and during the last few games I had to literally hide
my phone to avoid its notifications. The lag was more than a minute on England
matches.

To be fair, apart from the lag and that crash at the end of one game, the BBC
stream was a rock-solid HD, and it almost never buffered. ITV instead was low-
res crap, stuttered all the time, and even had compulsory ads. Both streams
got worse as the tournament neared the end, of course; in the first rounds the
latency was only a few dozen seconds.

------
dzonga
I used illegal streams this world cup. They seemed to have sub millisecond
latency i.e got the goals in near real time. Maybe, BBC & iTV should ask what
the pirates are using.

~~~
Rjevski
They’re most likely grabbing the feed directly from a TV tuner and then
sending that over RTP. While it won’t be sub-millisecond, it’s definitely a
lot faster than HLS.

------
com2kid
It is funny, they could feed it into Twitch and have a 5-10 second delay.

An idea which makes me incredibly curious as to how well Twitch would handle
that type of traffic!

------
davizao4
With the amount of content that internet have, torrent of movies with
incredible quality, beautiful documentaries, Netflix, youtube with your
favorite tv shows, TV turned obsolete except from sports that are transmited
live. So i feel like the main thing that tv has to got right its reduce to the
maximum the delay time over quality of image.

------
not_that_noob
It's not a problem that can be fixed. The endpoints - encoding at the
transmitter and decoding at the device - can be with the efforts underway made
somewhat equivalent between both modes. However, the problem is the path
between them - the Internet was never built for realtime delivery of media
streams. The many layers and devices along the route add delay, and on top of
that network congestion can add more. Unless the path is more or less
dedicated (as happens in broadcast, satellite or cable TV), there is no way to
ensure realtime delivery.

[PS Before anyone mentions RTP, this is a known problem with RTP - see:
[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp/faq.html](https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp/faq.html)

"RTP does not ensure real-time delivery. So how come it is called a real-time
protocol? No end-to-end protocol, including RTP, can ensure in-time delivery.
This always requires the support of lower layers that actually have control
over resources in switches and routers. RTP provides functionality suited for
carrying real-time content, e.g., a timestamp and control mechanisms for
synchronizing different streams with timing properties." ]

~~~
ec109685
Plenty of things stream in real-time with high quality video and low latency,
including video conferencing, FaceTime, YouTube live, etc.

------
stuartd
Very noticeable when switching to radio, which was at least 30 seconds ahead
of the broadcast signal, let alone streaming.

------
zorked
The easy solution would be to delay the TV signal by as much. This is only a
problem during the world cup, and only because your neighbors will yell goal
before you can see it. Delay artificially the TV and the problem is gone.

~~~
cheeze
The problem is just flipped. Now internet users will spoil it for cable users.

Good luck getting the cable companies to agree to a delayed signal.

------
saluki
y, it's funny when watching NFL over the air if I tweet my friend about a TD
he usually finds out from me since over the air is a few seconds ahead of what
he's seeing on DirectTV.

------
jeffrallen
One typo in the lede and one a few scrolls later. Wtf, Wired, no copyediting?

