Video: The challenges of deploying Apple’s Low Latency HLS In Real Life

HLS has taken the world by storm since its first release 10 years ago. Capitalising on the already widely understood and deployed technologise already underpinning websites at the time, it brought with it great scalability and the ability to seamlessly move between different bitrate streams to help deal with varying network performance (and computer performance!). In the beginning, streaming latency wasn’t a big deal, but with multi-million pound sports events being routinely streamed, this has changed and is one of the biggest challenges for streaming media now.

Low-Latency HLS (LL-HLS) is Apple’s way of bringing down latency to be comparable with broadcast television for those live broadcast where immediacy really matters. The release of LL-HLS came as a blow to the community-driven moves to deliver lower latency and, indeed, to adoption of MPEG-DASH’s CMAF. But as more light was shone on the detail, the more questions arose in how this was actually going to work in practice.

Marina Kalkanis from M2A Media explains how they have been working with DAZN and Akamai to get LL-HLS working and what they are learning in this pilot project. Choosing the new segment sizes and how they are delivered is a key first step in ensuring low latency. M2A are testing 320ms sizes which means very frequent requests for playlists and quickly growing playlist files; both are issues which need to be managed.

Marina explains the use of playlist shortening, use of HTTP Push in HTTP2 to reduce latency, integration into the CDN and what the CDN is required to do. Marina finishes by explaining how they are conducting the testing and the status of the project.

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Speaker

Marina Kalkanis Marina Kalkanis
CEO,
M2A Media

Video: Networking Fundamentals


Date: Thursday 12th December, 1pm EST / 18:00 GMT

Networking is increasingly important throughout the broadcast chain. This recorded webcast picks out the fundamentals that underpin SMPTE ST 2110 and that help deliver video streaming services. We’ll piece them together and explain how they work, leaving you with more confidence in talking about and working with technologies such as multicast video and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).

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Speaker

Russell Trafford-Jones Russell Trafford-Jones
Editor, http://138.68.177.241
Manager, Support & Services, Techex

Video: Introducing Low-Latency HLS

HLS has taken the world by storm since its first release 10 years ago. Capitalising on the already widely understood and deployed technologies already underpinning websites at the time, it brought with it great scalability and the ability to seamlessly move between different bitrate streams to help deal with varying network performance (and computer performance!)

HLS has continued to evolve over the years with the new versions being documented as RFC drafts under the IETF. Its biggest problem for today’s market is its latency. As originally specified, you were guaranteed at least 30 seconds latency and many viewers would see a minute. This has improved over the years, but only so far.

Low-Latency HLS (LL-HLS) is Apple’s answer to the latency problem. A way of bringing down latency to be comparable with broadcast television for those live broadcast where immediacy really matters.

Please note: Since this video was recorded, Apple has released a new draft of LL-HLS. As described in this great article from Mux, the update’s changes are

  • “Delivering shorter sub-segments of the video stream (Apple call these parts) more frequently (every 0.3 – 0.5s)
  • Using HTTP/2 PUSH to deliver these smaller parts, pushed in response to a blocking playlist request
  • Blocking playlist requests, eliminating the current speculative manifest request polling behaviour in HLS
  • Smaller, delta rendition playlists, which reduces playlist size, which is important since playlists are requested more frequently
  • Faster rendition switching, enabled by rendition reports, which allows clients to see what is happening in another playlist without requesting it in its entirety”[0]

Read the full article for the details and implications, some of which address some points made in the talk.

Furthermore, THEOplayer have released this talk explaining the changes and discussing implementation.

This talk from Apple’s HLS Technical Lead, Roger Pantos, given at Apple’s WWDC conference this year goes through the problems and the solution, clearly describing LL-HLS. Over the following weeks here on The Broadcast Knowledge we will follow up with some more talks discussing real-world implementations of LL-HLS, but to understand them, we really need to understand the fundamental proposition.

Apple has always been the gatekeeper to HLS and this is one reason the MPEG DASH exists; a streaming standard that is separate to any one corporation and has the benefits of being passed by a standards body (MPEG). So who better to give the initial introduction.

HLS is a chunk-based streaming protocol meaning that the illusion of a perfect stream of data is given by downloading in quick succession many different files and it’s the need to have a pipeline of these files which causes much of the delay, both in creating them and in stacking them up for playback. LL-HLS uses techniques such as reducing chunk length and moving only parts of them in order to drastically reduce this intrinsic latency.

Another requirement of LL-HLS is HTTP/2 which is an advance on HTTP bringing with it benefits such as having multiple requests over a single HTTP connect thereby reducing overheads and request pipelining.

Roger carefully paints the whole picture and shows how this is intended to work. So while the industry is still in the midst of implementing this protocol, take some time to understand it from the source – from Apple.

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Download the presentation

Speaker

Roger Pantos Roger Pantos
HLS Technical Lead,
Apple

Video: Specification of Live Media Ingest

“Standardisation is more than just a player format”. There’s so much to a streaming service than the video, a whole ecosystem needs to work together. In this talk from Comcast’s Mile High Video 2019, we see how different parts of the ecosystem are being standardised for live ingest.

RTMP and Smooth streaming are being phased out – without proper support for HEVC, VVC, HDR etc. they are losing relevance as well as, in the case of RTMP, support from the format itself. Indeed it’s clear that fragmented MP4 (fMP4) and CMAF are taking hold in their place so it makes sense for a new ingest standard to coalesce around these formats.

Rufael Mekuria from Unified streaming explains this effort to create a spec around live media ingest that is happening as part of MPEG DASH-IF. The work itself started at the end of 2017 with the aim of publishing summer 2019 supporting CMAF and DASH/HLS interfaces.

Rufael explains CMAF ingest used HTTP post to move each media stream to the origin packager. The tracks are separated into video, audio, timed text, subtitle and timed metadata. They are all transferred on separate tracks and is compatible with future codecs. He also covers security and timed text before covering DASH/HLS ingest which can also contain CMAF because HLS contains the capability to contain CMAF.

Reference software is available along with the <a href=”http://”https://dashif-documents.azurewebsites.net/Ingest/master/DASH-IF-Ingest.pdf” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>specification.

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Speaker

Rufael Mekuria Rufael Mekuria
Head of Research & Standardisation,
Unified Streaming