<story><title>How the BBC and ITV are fixing delays on World Cup live streams</title><url>http://www.wired.co.uk/article/england-vs-croatia-live-stream-bbc-iplayer-itv</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jscholes</author><text>I haven&amp;#x27;t been watching the football, but I have been streaming another live event for the past two weeks: Wimbledon.  My advantage comes from two things: I&amp;#x27;m blind, and the BBC&amp;#x27;s CDNs have audio-only variants for every HLS stream.  So I&amp;#x27;ve been able to cut out the huge amount of bandwidth that would otherwise be consumed by streaming HD video, run the audio-only variants through FFmpeg and seek right to the end until the stream buffers.  I&amp;#x27;m usually ahead of the official Wimbledon live scoreboard, and the same coverage on cable TV, by a few seconds.</text></comment>
<story><title>How the BBC and ITV are fixing delays on World Cup live streams</title><url>http://www.wired.co.uk/article/england-vs-croatia-live-stream-bbc-iplayer-itv</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s really interesting to see the tech being deployed to fix this problem. But it also amazes me how complicated we&amp;#x27;ve managed to make things. In the UK in particular - just a few years ago the vast majority of people received their TV through over-the-air broadcast. It&amp;#x27;s instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking.&lt;p&gt;Sports are a good test case, not just for latency but sheer demand. I worry that we&amp;#x27;ll face some kind of natural disaster in the not too distant future that&amp;#x27;ll make us wonder why we abandoned the resilience of OTA broadcast.</text></comment>