Firstly, any person can only ever be present at one event during any given moment in time. Secondly, the proliferation of events and the human capacity for genuine presence is not on an equal footing. These comparisons suggest that there are many events that are of sufficient magnitude (historical, informative, scientific, cultural, etc.) to compare with the multiplier for human presence. The opportunity cost of not being present at the event is often very significant – from all these missed experiences, one of these unvisited moments in world history, one called congress, one launched satellite, could be significant enough by itself to make a qualitative difference. Thus, the question of redistribution is not only who goes to which of these events; as important is a discussion of who should have the right to be provided with this content. This is particularly apposite in the age of digital communication, given the possibilities of global interactivity.
When you hear a friend or colleague excitedly retell an event, an exhibition, or a conference they have attended, at least some part of you wishes you could have been there too. Their description would be much more vivid if expressed in person. If they could provide a live feed in high definition, complete with auto-zoom, a steadicam, and sample voice data, then this would further intensify their impact. Indeed, from the most hallowed of ceremonies to the most ordinary of content, the limits of person-to-person reach for any given event are, in some senses, determined by the proximity of the individual. For example, UNESCO projects that by 2030, around 40% of all students will be enrolled in tertiary education. Nonetheless, two important aspects conspire to limit who gets to ‘be there’.
Background and Significance
The authorized host computer may offer the live event by sending the service request notification to the central server. When the central server receives this message, the central server recognizes the service request information related to host computer according to the received request. Finally, the central server receives the media data from the authorized host computer, and the media data is streaming to the client computers through the central server. This way to present the live event service has many disadvantages, such as if the central server is too far from the host computer in the network structure, the delay for the communication between them will be very long. Moreover, for illegal purposes, hackers may attack the central server and obtain their important information. The fast growth of the multimedia content makes the broadcast in the traditional method seems the cost factor which may limit its feature in the network.
The worldwide proliferation of the internet into the 21st century made the internet a popular information and entertainment medium used by people. As a result, it has become increasingly popular to offer a variety of information and entertainment services on the internet, completely changing the habits of people and having a profound impact on the way people live. People are gaining more convenience from their daily information and entertainment through these internet services. Live event service is one of the many services that offers an “anytime and anywhere” advantage to users – users can select the service and multimedia environment according to their interests from their homes. This has enabled the web to become an interactive multimedia environment offline. Therefore, multimedia streaming technology is a key communication technology for numerous people to benefit in a network environment given the popularity of the internet and multimedia content.
History of Live Event Video Streaming
The YouTube business model was a free video-sharing site, financed by homepage ads. The beta launch of Ustream and competitor Justin.tv in 2007 led the transformation of internet video into the ability to stream live. The ability to broadcast events live to the growing masses who could view internet content exploded live sports, bands, and political events. Why no moving-image service eclipsed it before? Because of user-controlled, video-friendly compression. Web 1.0 use of the limited bandwidth internet offered only windows of the world image. Users had to locate and download files, then use Real Media or Windows Media Player to play various types of files, with various high, mid, and low-quality settings and band adaptations.
In the beginning of live event video streaming, supporting network technologies were not able to sustain a consumer-grade user experience. The internet was and is a parallel technology to global disk digitization, which has allowed content to be converted into digital form for global transport. In what we now call “Web 1.0,” media were merely linked, leading people to what they described. Emerging in the late 1990s, “Web 2.0” offered interactive capabilities. In 2003, Flickr launched as an online photo storage and sharing site. Users could upload digital photos, label them, and create private or public albums to which friends could be invited. To date, millions of users have added billions of photos. Why? Because of increased bandwidth. Flickr filled a huge market need in the support of growing masses of digital still content, just as YouTube, emerging in 2005, did for digital moving images.
Early Developments
RealVideo is a video streaming system from Progressive Networks Incorporated, which was later rebranded to RealNetworks. It supported QoS streaming over the existing internet. The RealVideo server would unicast to multiple clients, and the video content would not need to be downloaded first, streaming directly from the RealVideo server to the RealVideo client software. At the receiving end of the video streaming viewer, the user’s network bandwidth was taken into consideration. There were a number of throughput settings and other compression options that could be changed. Different networks had different bandwidth limits. This was, of course, taken into consideration, and RealVideo could also display the RealAudio as well.
Video streaming was introduced in the mid-1990s, and one of the most notable early developments released in 1993 was the MBONE. The MBONE stands for Multicast Backbone and was a virtual network that existed over the existing internet, permitting multicast traffic. The MBONE made the use of multicast possible, and third-party video conferencing tools could now be installed and linked up to the existing MBONE network. Multicast was not specifically multipeer chat but was utilized for large group internet-based chat and one-way broadcasting. There was the multicast conference control tool “CUSEEME,” an audio-only multicast conferencing tool known as “VOXWARE,” and a chat-based multicast tool called “IRC.”
Technological Advancements
Evolution in all the engineering domains has led to the advent of very high-speed broadband services like optical fiber networks and 4G and 5G mobile communication networks, which have significantly transformed the media and entertainment landscape by gaining a more significant viewer base. The advances in live video, audio, and data compression techniques and the development of new video compression standards (like MPEG-4 AVC and its successors) have significantly enhanced the quality of video services, and at the same time, reduced the bandwidth required to deliver the video streams to the end-users, making the use of such services in broadcasting, web services, mobile communication, and video conferencing more popular. Important technological advances in computer and communication network fields like high-speed broadband internet communication networks, content delivery networks, enhanced video and audio compression techniques, low-cost video capturing platforms, and computer storage have made live video streaming service development a profitable business for many people throughout the world.
Key Components of Live Event Video Streaming Services
For online video and audio delivery to masses of people to occur in a truly live simultaneous manner, dependent upon very tight specified levels of quality, many key components and conceptually distinct network types must be combined. A number of separate but related networks deliver to users live event streaming services, the majority dedicated to specific points in the overall system. Some network types are generally provided by only a few companies, yet are of paramount importance to most live streaming events. To a lesser degree but still critically, individual networks must be provided by many companies widely distributed across the country. While many smaller events depend on indirect relationships for installation and provision, most large events are directly dependent on relatively few widely-disbursed network enterprises, especially for enabling wide-area services that permit the concept of ‘any event, any place, at any time’.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
The increasing interest in providing multimedia services to different kinds of devices made emerging new commercial video delivery models where commercial content (as long as some open source material) is available on the internet with full restrictions; that is, access is only available by paying a small fee that can be variable (adapting the price to the quality that the system provides to the user). In such commercial video delivery models, the following scenario describes how CDN companies interact with their customers: First, the company is informed that a new live event will be broadcast. At this point, it selects how the live event will be distributed by giving the user two links: the first link gives a poor quality of the live event stream at a cheap price and, in this case, the ticket is valid for a month, while the second link gives a good quality of the live event stream at an expensive price and, in this case, the ticket is basically a single event ticket. After that, when the user selects the delivery method (through the internet), and specifies the quality that he would like, the CDN servers start to transmit the video to the users contributing to the QoE.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have become the principal solution to offer satisfactory network performance at a reasonable cost. A CDN is a system of servers distributed over different geographic locations; each server is able to store content. So, when a client asks for an object, a specific server chooses which server will respond to that client request using a load balancing algorithm. This organizational structure comes with two main advantages. First, the CDN increases reliability since it decreases the concentration of the single network points (the clients are distributed among the servers of the CDN). Second, the CDN provides high performance (that is low response time) because it is possible to avoid long time transfers by creating a situation where the network distance between the client and the CDN server is short. CDN servers are hosted within broadband networks and the reason is simple: since the content requested by web users is multimedia in nature (such as video, audio, and images) and broadband networks are designed to offer a high throughput, these types of networks are the perfect places to host CDN servers.
Video Encoding and Transcoding
However, with the diverse range and increasing demand for live event video communication and paramount requirements on video QoE, more challenges and requirements need to be addressed. This includes adaptability for varieties of devices and constraints and the availability of local versus online generation for encoding and evolution of streaming. With a narrow bottleneck of network bandwidth deployed for live event video streaming services, bidirectional video communication quality constraint is typically dominated by video encoding. The video quality achieved is constrained by input light and output network available bandwidth. To ensure high universality, the same high-quality pixels can be generated and highly reused across all diameters and versatile device/device-specific requirements in the heterogeneous end-user population. Since the minimization of the computed page of video communication quality for video streaming services on any access device in real time, there is an uphill trend in a server-operated web service/client-owned equipment or overseen over the public/private network.
Video encoding involves processing raw video signals generated by an image sensor when capturing live events with cameras. It then breaks them up and reformats them into a digitally compressed format with the right codec/standard, bitrate, CRF, resolution, etc., optimal settings. The transcoding step contributes to video streaming in multiple bitrates and profiles delivered by live event video streaming services. These are tailored to best match the actual quality of experience, taking into account the active network constraint/bottleneck and the actual end user device capability. This is ensured within the available network bandwidth. It is the most important and complicated step in live event video streaming services after origin and before processing and transmission in the actual DCS layer. It is expected to have the highest O(N) X(N) complexity. With the exponential growth of the number N of streaming and recording devices in live events, it becomes a challenging issue regarding efficient use of computation and storage both in enterprise and cloud environments. A number of sophisticated video encoder/transcoder solutions by hardware, GPU, codec algorithm, and professional/custom design are offered and continuously evolving since the start of digital video communication and paramount requirements of video communication quality.
Popular Live Event Streaming Platforms
Justin.tv was the earliest video streaming platform for live broadcasting created in 2007. Even though Justin.tv had been popular, the content strategies grew and the platform has over 31 million channels by 2013. In light of this, they decided to concentrate on a specific sector, esports. As a result, they renamed Justin.tv to Twitch.tv in February 2014 and became one of the most well-known and significant live sports events. The specialized scope has made Twitch grow significantly in the market, thereby making Twitch one of the leading players in the video game events market and in live sports streaming. The participants of collective live event streaming experiments stated that despite mentioning other platforms in the live event streaming market, they all recognized Twitch.tv as their main reference.
Justin.tv
Ustream was one of the earliest live video broadcasting platforms on the internet, having been established in 2007, and has been popular for news broadcasts of large-scale events such as political debates, demonstrations, and notably the Obama presidential campaign. Ustream was, at first, known as Watershed, devoting its service to live broadcasting for conferences and similar events, and evolved further to open itself to the public, gaining huge recognition in the 2008 presidential election. MouseEvent Productions or Barefoot Wine (which produce a live music program) are examples of some exclusive organizations that used Ustream. Regarding monetization, Ustream provides both advertising and marketing capabilities for the streamers to use. On the other hand, Ustream monetizes from ads and subscriptions.
Ustream
This section provides a profile of six popular live event streaming services: Ustream, Justin.tv (now Twitch), Livestream.com, Bambuser, and YouNow, specifically focusing on their business models (pricing and features) and implementations for promotion and monetization of content.
YouTube Live
YouTube’s own report is bullish on its growth, stating that “live streaming leads to quicker revenue recognition for content producers. Live streaming is a fundamentally different user experience than on-demand content, and we hope that by providing on-demand and live content side by side, YouTube users will spend an increasing amount of time watching all types of content. Like the Facebook and Twitter streams, the live stream appears alongside normal content on the site, meaning users can be given cursory or fleeting glances of live content within feeds and, to keep the advertising coming back with value-adding propositions such as customized interactive overlays and produced content.
As the social video effect grows exponentially year on year, YouTube adds live video to its feature set with YouTube Live. Alongside the announced live service come specialist partners in a host of areas including mobile, news, gaming, and sports, with Google (whose YouTube owns and operates the service) providing a platform for how to build a YouTube Live product into a website, mobile phone, etc. One of the draws for webmasters and branding partners to use the service, although received negatively initially, is its revenue generation strategy for ads to be served pre-roll, during, and again post-stream. Today, YouTube, alongside providing a mainstream live video proposition, creates a competitive environment, and it provides an advertising-centric model.
Twitch
Twitch is a live streaming platform mainly focused on the transmission of video games. The viewer of the streams can support the content creator by donating funds. For each donation received by the creator, Twitch takes approximately 50%. Another monetization method included is the pay-per-view subscription. At present, the platform is offering three different subscription plans that allow the viewers to access exclusive emotes, public chatrooms, exclusive badges, and loyalty colors, according to the plan purchased. Users also have free access, which guarantees the following: no advertising, access to chat rooms, and the possibility of participating in the community. A third way to monetize Twitch content is through the sale of advertising space. A recent estimate (2021) states that the platform has 140 million monthly users.
Twitch was founded in 2011, sponsored by the start-up seed accelerator known as Y Combinator. It launched as a subsidiary of Justin.tv, which was a platform for live video streaming. Twitch was created specifically for live event broadcasting since Justin.tv already supported live streaming of user-created content. Two years later, in 2013, the platform was transformed into a separate division. When it was running only three years, the global company Amazon.com, mainly working in e-commerce, acquired Twitch for nearly 1 billion euros in 2014, giving each of the shareholders the agreed repayment. Today, the headquarters are in San Francisco, California, in the United States. The performances covered include video games, music, TV series, and reality shows.
Facebook Live
Facebook Live is Facebook’s foray into the live streaming market. Available to any Facebook user, it provides a simple in-app environment for a particular user’s community to follow his/her life via individual video posts or by following other events from friends/followed users. Although it is possible to use Facebook Live in a way analogous to how one uses Twitter, an important distinction is that it is the user’s community who request and follow live streams. This is completely different from how Twitter users consume live content where in stark contrast, event hashtags are open and can be consumed by passers-by. It is interesting to see if in the future Facebook will open up more the live streaming experience of business pages and brands, and not only the user community aspect. The video player is delivered by the Facebook SDK for iOS and Android, and for web blogs a WordPress plugin is available. A sample iOS application with Facebook Live data is seen in Figure 14.
The most important differentiating feature of the market is that live video platforms have access to large numbers of users who consume content within an app. The single greatest potential audience for any streaming event is the universe of users of the app within which the stream is consumed. With the app open, front and center, the push to have something great to watch onscreen is constant. This has two primary effects. First, the in-app nature of the experience makes it uniquely valuable for sponsors and advertisers; to be able to reach this audience as it is streaming the event makes for an extremely high-quality impression. The option for both pre-roll and in-skin marketing is fully utilized. Second, the environment can sustain social applications which are important but are missing from the over-the-top world; not everything is about advertising! Disney is a new player, in a peculiar manner, in live video streaming. They own ESPN which has vast quantities of sports content but which also suffers from falling subscriber numbers in the face of cord-cutting.
Challenges and Opportunities in Live Event Video Streaming
Although the first live event in the United States was broadcast in the early 1920s, live audio broadcasts did not become popular until the 1960s. There simply were not enough television and radio frequencies to support many broadcasts. The form and shape of audience towers and antennas capable of receiving the signals limited the range and reach of any broadcast, and signal strength was not strong enough to support many tuners in any one region. Additionally, shipping a live signal from one part of the country to another was a labor-intensive process since there were no broadcast satellite networks.
This chapter discusses the history and evolution of live event video streaming services. Many live event video streaming platforms are helping event owners—whether they are large concert promoters or small schools—reach a larger audience primarily using consumer broadband. This chapter’s primary focus is the development and democratizing influence of live event video streaming services and hardware we use. Then we provide an overview of the state of the art in building and operating large-scale live event streaming systems. Finally, we describe the next two steps in evolution: personal, stream-from-anywhere devices for consumers and the role broadcast will play in this rapidly expanding market.
Bandwidth and Latency Issues
Broadcast 4K and 8K video resolution supports four times and sixteen times the pixel number of current HDTV for the same visual angle. The new larger resolution provides viewers with a better experience when watching video on a large screen and/or sitting closer to the screen, such as with virtual reality. Except for the backbone network or the link between a user and the network closest point of presence (PoP) and where the PoP supports a required QoS for the live streaming, the service capacity is also very important.
Live video streaming has a unique set of quality of service requirements. These range from issues related to the amount of data, such as streaming large resolution 4K video content, to latency of individual chunks being limited in order to allow near real-time communications for some types of events. These conflicting requirements make the design of a live video streaming service a challenging task. The amount of data must be controlled for users with limited data plans and for crowd situations with the same ESV being pulled through the same DGS with limited link capacities. To solve these challenging needs, a live streaming service needs careful resource allocation in regard to the service area.
Monetization Strategies
Advertisem*nts are viewed as intrusive by live video streaming consumers and have to be reserved for non-interactive events. The number of advertisem*nts is perceived as “too many”, and when presented there is concern with the quality of streaming experience. Even when subscribing to, or participating in, interesting events (e.g., virtual concerts), consumers do object to the imposition of ad insertions by the eventlivestreaming service. Estimates suggest that nearly 50% of the content viewers do object, with a significant fraction considering less than 50% acceptable. When Evolution and Impact of Live Video Streaming Services this is further assessed, it is found that fifty percent of participants offer the opinion that the quality of service is reduced by insertions. Cost to the consumer of being a premium member are expected as subscription-based services. In a short space of time, many services have accumulated a considerable number of subscribers who may be currently lost or converted from an existing customer base.
In a digital era where abundant content is so easily accessed without charge, it is important to identify effective strategies for monetization. Services will soon fail if proper justification cannot exist for the intense investment associated with the acquisition of content (or content production) and infrastructure costs. This is currently the major challenge faced by live video streaming services. It has been argued that “A model that goes ‘beyond the banners’ will push global digital spend to an entirely new level”. The global spend by the end of 2017 of US$248 billion may well be mainly supported by ad-spend, but premium, pay-per-view via “identity-driven audience browse-and-buys” may have offered an additional US$215 billion (or roughly double). More recent global live video streaming forecasts generated by Statista predict a rise in ad prerequisites, and sales increments in videos on demand (VOD). However, advertising is one of the main strategies for monetization.
