It’s 2020 Why Do Our Streams Still Lag Behind Broadcast TV?

I’m sure at this point everyone has used a streaming app to watch a game they really didn’t want to miss. Whether you’re a cord cutter and have to rely exclusively on live streams, or you have cable but found yourself out of the house due to an unavoidable engagement that found you resorting to watching your big game on your phone. Whatever the reason, I’m sure you’ve also had the misfortune of having a score or key moment spoiled by a friend or an update or even a live broadcast that wasn’t lagging behind. It turns out our “live” streams aren’t as live as we’d like to think they are, and still lag behind broadcast TV by anywhere from 15 seconds to 1 minute. The lingering question is why? With 4G LTE and high speed Wi-Fi available everywhere and the advent of 5G the problem certainly doesn’t seem to be our internet speeds. So who’s to blame for our inability to enjoy lag free streams?

Turns out the culprit is quite simply physics and technical limitations. No matter what you do or try there is no getting around one fundamental problem when streaming a live event. Your content has to travel miles and miles from the camera at the stadium or arena to your device. Complicating the process are the series of steps that have to take place in order to actually send the video over the internet to your device. They have to take gigabytes worth of video data and convert that into a mobile friendly data friendly format. So the first step in that process is taking the video and breaking it up into smaller chunks for example 10 seconds at a time. They then have to take this chunk of video and encode it into a mobile and streaming platform friendly format so they they aren’t sending hundreds of megabytes of video over the internet, in a format your device won’t understand. Additionally it needs to break that video up into multiple resolutions so that it can send the appropriate video based on internet speeds of the receiving device. This way if you are on a particularly slow connection you quickly receive a low resolution version rather than waiting for a minute or more for a high definition video. Now this process in and of itself while time consuming doesn’t solely explain the lag we experience.

For that we look to the methods that most streaming services employ. They’ve found that most consumers would rather be on a delay but experience smooth uninterrupted playback than be relatively up to date but experience constant buffering. As such after the chunk of video is converted and ready it isn’t immediately sent to your device, instead your streaming service server holds it until it has a few different chunks so that it can show you the next 30–60 seconds without needing to buffer. This also provides it some wiggle room to begin processing the next chunk of video and help prevent buffering.

Unfortunately a couple more factors add to this complexity. First there’s ads, the most appealing aspect of streaming for video providers is the ability to provide targeted personal ads, something they’re unable to do on Broadcast TV. Unfortunately this process takes additional time, and requires a separate workflow which serves to add to the delay we experience, even more so when the goal is for your stream to cut to and from ads smoothly and consistently. The good news is there has been some progress in this aspect with base delays dropping over the past couple of years from 60 seconds, to 30 seconds last year and now many streaming services are at their goal or close to it of a 15 second delay. Unfortunately as it stands it will be difficult to get that delay much smaller in the immediate future but hopefully with improved encoding and faster speeds we’ll soon be able to reach single digit delays.

But the second culprit behind us having to suffer these delays is the lack of standardization, both across services, and across devices. Your iPhone asks for a completely different format than my OnePlus 7. Similarly FuboTV utilizes a different delivery method than ESPN+ and other competitors. This is why we can have such a range in the expected delay, it depends not only on your internet speeds, but the device you’re using and finally even the streaming service you subscribe to. For example FOMOPOP found that FuboTV had the shortest delay and was the most aggressive when you’re on a good internet connection delivering a delay as low as 15 seconds, by contrast they found Sling to be the worst of the services they tested with a delay of 55 seconds. However this low delay has its trade-offs, in the case of Fubo they found that it had below average streaming reliability. It seems that YouTube TV and Philo offer some of the best of both worlds with them offering great and above average reliability, respectively and both providing a 25 second live delay.

Unfortunately while the streaming industry has made progress they have been slowed by the increasing demand for 4K video which increases file sizes and requires more robust internet. While improved codecs such as HVEC have helped them make the clips that they send longer that is only for standard and high definition. They are still struggling to adapt to the requirements of 4K video. But as encoding technology improves, and more consumers have access to the faster speeds of 5G and faster home internet there’s hope that within the next decade we might see live streams at an equivalent delay of broadcast TV. Sadly there’s not much for you, the consumer to do right now to improve your live streams aside from making sure you’re accessing it from the fastest internet connection you have available at the moment. If delay is the most important thing for you, and you’re willing to sacrifice some reliability for it, then maybe sign up for Fubo. Otherwise you might want to think about sticking to broadcast TV until streaming can catch up. Until then I want to experience sports with the least delay possible, and so will remain a cable customer. Here’s to hoping in a few years I can finally cut the cord.