Oliver Lietz, CEO of nanocosmos, joined streaming expert Lukas Navickas from servers.com on stage at the International Broadcasting Convention for an informal chat on the topic 'how to deliver low-latency live video at scale'. In the session, they discussed factors driving the demand for live streaming solutions, the main challenges in delivering broadcasting technologies, and the role of infrastructure in facilitating low-latency live video streaming.
In this article, we put ultra-low latency video streaming in context and recap the highlights of the talk.
Why the demand for low-latency live video streaming technology is increasing
The demand for interactive real-time video streaming experiences is increasing. Today, 27% of internet users watch live streaming content weekly and the global market size for interactive streaming is expected to grow by more than 24.9% between now and 2030.
For nanocosmos, the demand comes from specific vertical sectors such as auctions, betting, gaming, enterprises, and broadcasting — all of which have begun to invest more heavily in live streaming technologies in an attempt to engage audiences through interactivity and gamification.
“There are different sectors that want to increase audience engagement”, explained Oliver Lietz. “They want not just to increase the audience, but to build a community that stays on the channel and remains connected to the channel producers to stay engaged over the long term”.
For live video streaming platforms like nanocosmos, maintaining ultra-low latency is essential to providing this audience engagement. When video content is streamed almost in real-time, with virtually no delay between capture and playback, it provides a more interactive streaming experience, akin to a real-world interaction. In turn, creating deeper connections between the audience and the content.
Challenges of live video streaming
The comprehensive nanoStream solution from nanocosmos comes with everything needed to provide real-time and ultra-low latency streaming to its customers. Everything from adaptive bitrate to streaming protection and advanced analytics.
“We ourselves have built the entire infrastructure based on our own technology, content delivery networks (CDNs) and edge points around the world”, said Oliver. “Then, we created the player technology and the analytics on top of that so that customers can directly implement live video streaming into their web applications. It's very stable, 100% robust and maintained by our infrastructure partners”.
But even with such robust and specialized technology, consistently delivering high-quality experiences to the end viewer has not come without challenges. Challenges such as compliance, security, and providing high-availability infrastructure.
“As a European company based in Berlin, we need to be compliant with GDPR. It's very important that our corporate clients have compliance in this area”, added Oliver.
“On a global scale, we also deal with security threats. Everything from DDoS attacks to attempts to hijack content and rebroadcast it elsewhere. These are things we need to identify along with our clients to protect them against misuse".
“Ultimately, the challenge is always to have a watchable live stream and create the best experience for everyone connected to the stream".
“There are many challenges in making the video technology itself reliable. Then, bringing that technology to a new production environment on a global scale requires great infrastructure. It's important to have the right operation points so that clients can send us a live stream, have it in the right place as close as possible to the production, and then deliver it efficiently around the world”.
The role of infrastructure in facilitating live video streaming
For real-time video streaming platforms like nanocosmos, infrastructure is essential to ensure high availability and ultra-low latency.
“We are receiving more and more requests from around the world and we are always trying to provide the best possible quality of service for them. We need the right infrastructure partners so that we can provide connections as close as possible to our viewers”, said Oliver.
That's why nanocosmos adopts a hybrid infrastructure approach, partnering with various providers, including bare-metal hosting, to ensure:
- The points of presence (PoPs) are kept as close as possible to the client's production locations
- Access to reliable and high-performance streaming servers
- Sufficient infrastructure scalability to meet demand
- Support from teams of streaming infrastructure experts
“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 clients can focus on their businesses”.
“Ultimately, we need to have the right back-office partners to work around potential issues, because there are always issues in global network delivery. Partners like servers.com allow us to connect as closely and efficiently as possible, with the least amount of issues possible”.
The future of real-time streaming
With the demand for live video streaming of low latency continuing to rise, it's a ripe space for innovation.
“We always drive changes and build new innovations on our cloud platform”, shared Oliver. “It's always a balance between creating new features based on what's available in the market and implementing that effectively on our production platform to build an additional service”.
Unsurprisingly, a topic that continued to dominate at IBC 2024 was AI. And it's something that Oliver and his team at nanocosmos are already advancing.
“AI is big. It's everywhere, of course”, continued Oliver. “It comes with many opportunities, but when you want to implement it in a live streaming workflow, it requires a lot of resources. It's important to have the right server infrastructure and the right partners in the AI space”.
And despite the hurdles that come with integrating AI into live streaming workflows, nanocosmos is pushing forward. Backed by a reliable base infrastructure, the team has already begun implementing AI services for live translation and transcription and is now looking to implement AI technologies at the video level to enhance image quality and rendering.
Learn more about nanocosmos by reading our extended interview with Oliver or check out the latest podcasts from nanocosmos.
Attendees of the iGaming ICE 2025 show in Barcelona can visit nanocosmos' booth #5F32 to learn more or schedule meetings at: https://www.nanocosmos.net/ice-2025/.
Lukas Navickas, streaming expert at servers.com and Jamie Daniel, iGaming expert at servers.com will be present at ICE Barcelona on January 21 and 22, 2025. Contact them at lukas@servers.com or jamie@servers.com to schedule a meeting at the event.
Source: nanocosmos
