You’ll be familiar with the problem. You settle down to watch the match on the BBC iPlayer. The footballer steps up to take a penalty and before he’s even touched the ball a loud cheer comes from the direction of your neighbour’s garden.
Such problems could be over following work by BBC Research & Development.
At a demonstration at IBC 2018 in Amsterdam, the team will show how the gap between an internet-delivered live stream and live TV via broadcast can be eliminated.
Latency issues that emerged during the World Cup – though have been with us since video began to be streamed over the internet – can cause delays of up to 30 seconds.
Chris Poole, lead research engineer for BBC R&D, said: “Obviously, viewers were frustrated this summer hearing goals go in before they saw them, or finding out about a red card decisions on social media first. That’s why we’re so excited by the results of our experiments, and we’re hoping that the demonstration we’ll be showing at IBC will help accelerate the work taking place across the industry to eliminate long delays from internet streams.”
The demonstration can be found in the Future Zone.
