Company
Date Published
Jan. 30, 2020
Author
Phil Cluff
Word count
1951
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Apple has revised its HLS specification for delivering streams with low glass-to-glass latency, addressing concerns about the original standard's implementation and adoption barriers. The latest revision removes the requirement for HTTP/2 PUSH delivery of parts of media segments and introduces a new prefetch behavior signaled by a new tag in the HLS playlist - EXT-X-PRELOAD-HINT. This change makes Apple's LL-HLS specification more closely interoperable with MPEG DASH-LL, improving cache efficiency at CDN edges and potentially resulting in cost savings. However, challenges remain regarding bandwidth estimation in a browser and widespread adoption of the revised standard.