The community gave us low-latency live streaming. Then Apple took it away.
At WWDC, Apple announced updates to HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) specification aimed at reducing live video stream latency. HLS is a segmented delivery technology used for live and on-demand streaming across various devices. However, it has been prone to high latency when used for live streaming. To address this issue, Apple introduced a new low-latency mode called ALHLS. This solution involves partial segments, HTTP/2 pushed segments, blocking playlist requests, playlist delta updates, and faster bitrate switching. While the implementation of ALHLS is complex, it addresses longstanding problems with HLS. However, there are challenges in adoption due to mandatory use of HTTP/2, which isn't widely implemented on many CDNs. The community has also been working on a simpler LHLS solution using chunked transfer encoding, but Apple chose not to involve the community in its ALHLS development.
Company
Mux
Date published
June 14, 2019
Author(s)
Phil Cluff
Word count
3571
Language
English
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