Neil Craig

A colleague pointed out that WhatHIFI measured latency on TV streaming, with a view to watching live sport.

That reminded me that we reduced the stream latency on BBC iPlayer over the last couple of weeks. You'll mostly have approx. 12 seconds latency on iPlayer TV - HD or UHD, they're the same now.

There's a few exceptions but for most people, that's where it's at and is thanks to a ton of work from BBC R&D and teams adjacent to mine in Public Service.

#WorldCup #BBC

https://www.whathifi.com/tv-home-cinema/televisions/i-tested-every-major-way-to-watch-the-world-cup-live-heres-which-one-lags-the-least

I tested every major way to watch the World Cup live – here's which one lags the least

Is Sky Real Time your saviour from spoiled goals?

What Hi-Fi?
Jun 23 at 9:50amWeb
Show threadC Wilkinson3d ago

@tdp_org Is that 12s behind Freeview's 7-8s (i.e. 19-20s from live) or 12s behind live (only 4-5s behind Freeview)?

Either way, well done. It sounds like a substantial improvement

Show threadNeil Craig2d ago

@techwilk It's 12 seconds behind live.

Yeah, they did well eh? UHD in particular came down ~4x from 50 seconds to 12 seconds.

Show threadLambic2d ago
@tdp_org probably not related but i noticed watching iplayer the last few weeks (I'm usually not in uk) that the subtitles often lag behind the shows, what's the deal with that?
Show threadForst2d ago
@tdp_org I applaud the effort to reduce live latency! It's so sad that most others seem to have given up on/deprioritised that with the advent of HLS (even though it can do low latency), and 40-50 seconds became the norm.
Show threadaspragg2d ago

@tdp_org Good job getting the latency from 31 seconds to 12 seconds...

...but even with Freeview at 8 seconds, in the digital world that feels like *forever*! What is taking up all those cycles?? Noting that in 1 second, light in a vacuum can go round the whole Earth 8 times, and in fibre 5 times.

Maybe OP should get themselves an FM radio to listen to the games, in order to not be scooped by their neighbours! Delay on those is still going to be under a second, right? :-)

(*31* seconds!)

Show threadMarkus Peuhkuri1d ago
In one of lectures of my Internet traffic measurement course, I have a discussion item about different broadcast events (including different live sports) how much delay they tolerate. It is a quite nice way to get students to weight if the delay matters or not and when.
@tdp_org @karppinen