Earlier this month, ahead of the International Broadcasting Convention, we sat down with Oliver Lietz, CEO of nanocosmos to talk about the company’s innovative real-time live streaming solutions. Continuing the conversation, Oliver joined servers.com Streaming Specialist, Lukas Navickas on stage at IBC 2024 for a fireside chat on the topic of “how to deliver live low-latency video at scale”.
During the session, Oliver and Lukas talked about factors driving demand for live streaming solutions, the key challenges that come with delivering live streaming technologies, and the role of infrastructure in facilitating low-latency live video streaming.
In this blog post, we put ultra-low latency video streaming into context and recap the talk’s highlights.
Video latency is a measure of the delay between video capture and playback. It can be categorized in three groups (standard, low, and ultra-low latency). Achieving ultra-low latency is crucial for live streaming services to ensure end-users enjoy live playback in real-time, without delay.
Demand for interactive, real-time video streaming experiences are on the up. Today 27% of internet users watch live streaming content on a weekly basis and the global interactive streaming market size is estimated to grow by a further 24.9% between now and 2030.
For nanocosmos, the demand comes from specific verticals like auctioning, betting, gaming, enterprise and broadcast – all of which have started investing more heavily in live streaming technologies in a bid to engage audiences through interactivity and gamification.
“There are different industries that want to increase audience engagement,” explained Oliver. “They want to not only increase viewership but to build a community that stays on the channel and stays connected to the producers of the channel to keep engaged in the long run”.
For live video streaming platforms like nanocosmos, maintaining ultra-low latency is central to delivering on this audience engagement. When video content is transmitted in close to real-time with virtually no delay between video capture and playback, it provides a more interactive streaming experience, akin to a real-world interaction. In turn creating deeper connections between audiences and the content.
“It’s important to have the right points of operation so clients can send us a live stream, have it at the right location as close as possible to production and then deliver it efficiently around the globe.”
nanocosmos’ comprehensive nanoStream solution comes with everything required to deliver real-time, ultra-low latency streaming for their clients. Everything from adaptive bitrate to stream protection and advanced analytics.
“We created the whole infrastructure ourselves based on our own technology, content delivery networks (CDNs), and edge points all around the globe,” said Oliver. “Then we created the player technology and analytics on top of that so customers can directly implement live video streaming into their web applications. It’s very stable, 100% robust and upheld by our infrastructure partners”.
But even with such a robust and specialized technology, consistently delivering top quality end viewer experiences hasn’t come without challenges. Challenges like compliance, security, and sourcing high-availability infrastructure.
“As a European company based out of Berlin, we need to comply with GDPR. It’s very important for our corporate customers to have compliance in this area,” furthered Oliver.
“On a global scale we also deal with security threats. Everything from DDoS attacks to attempts to hijack content and re-stream it elsewhere. These are things we must identify together with our clients to protect them against misuse.
“Ultimately, the challenge is always to have a watchable live stream and to create the greatest experience for everyone who is connected to the stream.
“There are a lot of challenges with making the video technology itself reliable. Then to bring that technology into a new production environment on a global scale requires great infrastructure. It’s important to have the right points of operation so clients can send us a live stream, have it at the right location as close as possible to production and then deliver it efficiently around the globe”.
“Partners like servers.com enable us to connect in the closest possible way and the most efficient way, with as few problems as possible.”
For real-time video streaming platforms like nanocosmos, infrastructure is key to ensuring that high availability and ultra-low latency.
“We are getting more and more requests from all over the world and we’re always looking to try to provide the best possible service quality to them. We need the right infrastructure partners so we can provide connections as close as possible to our viewers,” said Oliver.
It’s why nanocosmos takes a hybrid infrastructure approach, partnering with multiple providers, including bare metal hosting, to ensure:
Points of presence (PoPs) are maintained as close to clients’ production sites as possible
Access to reliable, high-performance streaming servers
Sufficient infrastructure scalability to meet demand
Support from teams of streaming infrastructure specialists
“It’s essential that we have partners who can help us solve network issues. That way we can focus on the video technology and our customers can focus on their business.
“Ultimately, we need to have the right back-office partners to work around possible issues – because there are always issues in global network delivery. Partners like servers.com enable us to connect in the closest possible way and the most efficient way, with as few problems as possible”.
“AI comes with a lot of opportunities, but when you want to implement that into a live streaming workflow it takes a lot of resources. It’s important to have the right server infrastructure and the right partners in the AI space.”
With demand for low-latency live video streaming continuing to soar, it’s a space ripe for innovation.
“We have always been driving change and building new innovations into our cloud platform,” shared Oliver. “It’s always a balance between creating new features based on what’s available on the market and effectively implementing this into our production platform to build an additional service”.
Unsurprisingly, one topic that continued to dominate at IBC 2024 was AI. And it’s something that Oliver and his team at nanocosmos are already making headway with.
“AI is big. It’s everywhere of course,” continued Oliver. “It comes with a lot of opportunities, but when you want to implement that into a live streaming workflow it takes a lot of resources. It’s important to have the right server infrastructure and the right partners in the AI space”.
And despite the obstacles that come with integrating AI into live-streaming workflows, nanocosmos are striving ahead. Upheld by a reliable foundational infrastructure, the team have already started implementing AI services for live translation and transcription and are now looking towards implementing AI technologies at the video level to improve picture quality and rendering.
Thank you to our partners at nanocosmos for joining us at IBC 2024. Watch the full session here and learn more about nanocosmos by reading our extended interview with Oliver.
