Real-Time Streaming at Scale

Wowza

Whether it’s the local high school’s homecoming football game, or a wedding, or even a corporate gathering, it seems almost everyone wants to stream their live event over the Internet to a potential audience of thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions.

Given the advances in encoding appliances, and even a few high-end mobile smartphones, the challenge these days is less about getting a good stream from the encoder but more about getting it out to the audience in their preferred app, platform, or protocol of choice.

A real-time stream is as “live” as live streaming gets. In other words, your typical live stream actually operates with anywhere from a few seconds to nearly a minute of latency between the recording of the event and the time it actually reaches the viewers’ screens. Real-time streaming—also known as ultra-low-latency streaming—reduces this time to less than a second. This is ideal for use cases where even a minimal delay can be debilitating for viewers.