The BBC has announced an expansion of its low latency streaming trial on BBC iPlayer beta. Chris Poole, Lead R&D engineer, said there will be an increase in the number of supported devices and an extension in the testing period. “This next phase will allow us to measure more precisely how well low latency streaming performs outside of our lab and in people’s homes, across different networks and conditions. It’ll also help us to understand what it takes to deliver live content online as fast and reliably as broadcast.”
BBC Research & Development has been exploring how streaming latency can be reduced while maintaining the present quality and reliability. While the results have been encouraging, demonstrating that the performance of the low latency streams has been largely like conventional streams. However, there are more complex factors such as Wi-Fi connectivity, ISP congestion and variations between devices that have a significant impact on the reliability of streams.
By extending the trial Poole says the BBC will further explore device compatibility by including a wider range of TV and streaming device models. “Some of these are yet to fully support the behaviour described previously whereby a TV that has started behind the target latency or has subsequently fallen behind can play slightly faster than normal speed to catch up. Whilst this capability is necessary to achieve a consistent low latency, we have temporarily extended the trial to TVs that can’t yet do this. Although the latency will not be quite as low as for those devices that can catch up, we will get valuable data on how other aspects of low latency streaming perform,” he explains.
The trial stream is currently available from 8am – 10pm BST for viewers who have set their location to England or Scotland. It is expected to run for around a month.