The Biggest Live Streaming Challenges and Tech Workarounds to Address Them

It is estimated that by the end of 2027, the live streaming market will be valued at around $247.27 billion, showcasing this trend’s great potential. Yet, opportunities often go hand in hand with challenges. So, what are the most significant tech challenges that live streaming faces today, and how can they be addressed?

The Explosive Growth of Live Streaming

Live streaming is trending worldwide: with a live streaming platform, individual content bloggers or top brands can broadcast anything, from cooking and gaming to singing, and people can watch all kinds of live streams anytime and anywhere. At times, the number of viewers for a particular live stream can go beyond one million during the broadcasts by popular streamers.

The dramatic growth of live streaming in several areas requires investment in unprecedented streaming quality, massive bandwidth, latency-free broadcasting and a whole string of other things. Besides, as technological opportunities are developing and the number of viewers is snowballing, addressing the evolving needs and challenges of streaming live videos coming along with the growth becomes essential.

If you’re building a live streaming platform (or have this idea for now), check out the major challenges with live video streaming and how to tackle them with technology.

The Biggest Live Streaming Challenges and Tech Workarounds

Inconsistent Streaming Quality

Unstable or inconsistent streaming flow can ruin the viewer experience and lead to viewers abandoning the live stream — or even the live streaming platform — entirely.

Reasons for inconsistent streaming quality may vary from poor bandwidth or lack of server processing power to inconsistent bitrate or spikes in packet loss. Apparently, the solution depends on the specific challenge.

Solutions: For instance, when it comes to bitrate or packet loss, you need to ensure that the video stream is automatically readjusting when packet loss exceeds a minimum threshold. Thus, the viewers will not experience lagging and pixelation.

If the reason roots in demanding bandwidth, make sure that video resolution optimization and capacity scaling work smoothly and do not cause any noticeable hiccups for a viewer.

The Metadata Dilemma

It is another major challenge with live video streaming. Metadata includes information about the entire video stream, file, or specific video frames. It is created by cameras, encoders, and other video processing elements and can include timestamps, video resolution, file size, closed captioning, audio languages, ad-insertion points, colour spaces, error messages, and much more. The challenge here is that metadata must recognize whichever element or device it is intended for.

Another big challenge related to metadata lies in handling the heavy load, namely the total volume of viewers requesting the same content simultaneously and the complexities of serving the right content and metadata versions to each user.

Solution: One of the fundamental aspects of addressing the metadata synchronization challenge is a well-established and well-crafted architecture. In particular, it is essential to organize the database. While there is no single database on earth that could help address and prevent all the possible issues related to metadata, using a bunch of sufficient databases such as PostgreSQL and AWS Aurora can ease dealing with some of these issues.

Realities of Latency

The best platforms can be subjected to challenges of streaming live videos that can significantly limit online video quality when it comes to the realities of latency and reliability. The main challenge here is to reduce possible delay and keep the live stream, well live. How can you achieve that?

Solution: To ensure low latency, a live streaming platform should be backed by a reliable protocol. For instance, RTMP/HLS streaming protocols combo can help decrease latency into the 12–15 second zone. Or, SRT protocol which leverages real-time IP communications development, reduces latency and eliminates freezes and stuttering, while offering the decent streaming speed.

Device Compatibility

Users can access live streams through TVs, smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc. So the first challenge for providers is ensuring that users can watch the video stream on any other devices they choose. The second challenge lies in the dilemma of whether to distribute the multiple video stream through a single service provider or send one transcoded stream.

Solution: The solution to this streaming live video challenge is to select a fully adaptive stream that can easily adjust or readjust to any bitrate and resolution. This option removes the user’s obstacle to watching the video stream on any screen. The second challenge can be solved via transcoding the stream for the devices as needed. The second solution, moreover, can solve both issues in one go as it will save the bandwidth required for live streaming, prevent latency and at the same time improve cost efficiency.

Live Streaming Platform Architecture

Live streaming demands a large amount of data to be processed and transferred with limited bandwidth of communication channels. However, even with all the technological advancements, there might be challenges in the platform architecture. Some of the standard issues developers face are scalability, configuration, and infrastructure of the live streaming platform. Furthermore, the platform architecture must ensure efficient in-built stream processing, storage, data integration, and real-time analytics.

Solution: Creating the backend infrastructure is possibly the most complex part of building a live streaming platform. During the development stage, you must decide which database to use, pick program languages and other essential components like API integrations and SDKs. Once the development is stable, focus on installation, DevOps, documentation, quality assurance, performance, and security.

Wrapping up

The list of live streaming challenges that tech leaders have to tackle today can go on and touch upon more aspects, such as organizing reporting and analytics, ensuring digital rights management, implementing AI capabilities and more.

Author: Max Kalmykov
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt

Originally published on https://www.dataart.com/blog.