Why low latency is essential for delivering realtime updates at scale

Low latency is crucial for delivering successful realtime updates, with latencies needing to be in the low hundreds of milliseconds for users to perceive updates as "live" or instantaneous. Two major reasons why low latency is important for realtime updates at scale are the brand promise of realtime and user expectations of scalability. Companies must ensure regional and global coverage, efficient message routing, manageable message payloads, and optimized encoding processes to guarantee low latency delivery at scale. Building a system from scratch can be costly and challenging, so many companies opt for services like Ably that provide APIs and SDKs for broadcasting realtime data with predictable low latency.