Top 5 Things I've Messed Up in Live Streaming

Top 5 things I’ve F’d up (In Live

Streaming)

About me

• GotFrag.com

• Major League Gaming

• Product Manager for Streaming Media at

Fastly

• Head of Product at Fastly

What’s this all about?

• Live streaming (not live linear)

• The (comedic) errors:

5. Forest, Trees. The big picture.

4. Latency sucks.

3. Failover. Not Fall Over.

2. Redundancy is not redundant.

1. Death by a thousand cuts. Measure it!

Some assumptions

• What:

– Live streaming is hard

– It shouldn’t be.

– But it is.

– It’s real time.

– So it’s hard.

• Why:

– “Analog” broadcast to “Digital”

medium

– Every step of the signal path can

break it

– And then there’s the Internet.

#5: The whole picture is important

• Analog to Digital

• Wires to Code

• Complexity

• Troubleshooting and QA is therefore

hard

• Studio != Touring Show

Live Streaming (Analog Side)

Live Streaming (Digital side)

#5: What got F’d.

• Audio out of sync

• Root cause was on the switcher <>

audio board

• Keyframes >1s on Encoder

compounded problem

#4: Spoilers suck

• Time Behind Live (TBL) is critical

• Broadcast standard is <15s TBL

• In other words, latency sucks.

– Latency = Buffering, jitters

– Latency = Spoilers

– Latency = WTF just happened.

Latency Sources (Digital side)

Source Ideal Avg Latency

Encoding <100ms

Uplink IP = <100ms, Sat = <1500ms

Ingest <10ms

Transcoding 50 - 500ms

CDN 150 – 1500 ms

Last Mile: Player / Browser / User Internet

?????

Total: 3610ms (3.6sec) + Last mile

#4 What got F’d

• RTMP delivery sucks on a CDN

– 5min into broadcast = 5sec TBL

– 30min into broadcast = 30sec TBL

– 8hrs into broadcast = 2min TBL

• Trolls hate spoilers. So do legit fans.

• Separate stack from normal delivery, older

hardware

• HTTP streaming is the answer (HLS!!)

#3: Fail over. Not Fall over.

• Duh.

#3: What got F’d

• Just cause the vendor says so, doesn’t

mean it _IS_ so.

• Test it.

• No really, TEST IT.

• Can you fail back and forth?

• Does it cause disconnects at player?

#2: Redundancy is not redundant

• Analog

– Matrixed encoders

– Multiple uplinks

– Back up routers

• Digital

– Cloud transcoding

– Multi-CDN

#2: What got F’d

• Production Budget

– $10k/hr for sat truck

• Upstream ISP link

from venue died

• Fix: Microwave pt to

pt to the Luxor.

#1: Real time feedback. Flexible solutions

Digital feedback:

• Analytics.

– Disconnects

– Buffering

– Edge usage

– Load on systems

– Geo distro

– etc

Analog feedback

• Leverage the audience

– Twitter

• Watch the stream yourself

• Filter the noise

Flexible partners and solutions

#1: What got F’d

• Tendency is to have digital side isolated from the

analog side.

• Don’t. Analog thinks about the room. Digital thinks

about the “Internets” Put the two together.

Thank you

www.fastly.com