HAVING YOUR LIVE STREAM
AND TIME-SHIFTING IT TOO
By KEN HAREN | SOLUTIONS ENGINEERING MANAGER, TELESTREAM
Live programming continues to drive viewership and audience engagement, making
it especially attractive to advertisers and direct marketers looking to attract followers.
At the same time, audiences are moving to a wider gamut of viewing platforms, which
offer an increasing number of ways to time-shift the viewing experience for their con-
venience. Ensuring that programming is available and optimized for each potential
“viewing window” at the highest quality, while also preserving rights agreements, is
paramount for a modern broadcaster or content owner.
Live Window
Whether delivering live linear programming, or
producing live events to an OTT platform, the
first opportunity for the audience to engage with
content is in the live viewing window. In addi-
tion to producing a high-quality live stream that
works across devices and platforms, today’s con-
tent programmers must develop sophisticated
delivery strategies for managing an Internet-scale
live viewing audience. Their operations need to
address advertising workflow, subscriber manage-
ment, digital rights policy and frequently-chang-
ing brand marketing initiatives. Programmers
are continuing to leverage social media as a live
second screen to entice audiences to premium
shows and increase audience engagement, and
want to synchronize the audience experience as
tightly as possible across the broadcast, OTT and
social domains.
Today’s live video solutions can no longer regard
each destination endpoint as a complete channel.
Originating channels today commonly include a
mix of multiple live stream origin endpoints to
54 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com
support live redundancy and content distribution
network (CDN) load balancing. This is required
to mitigate the “hug” of the Internet for programs
that garner large audiences. Additional delivery
endpoints to social media destinations for some
or all of the premium content experience must
also be a component of the live channel. Lastly,
a live video cache and professional video archive
recording are critical to executing sophisticated
live-to-VOD workflows. It’s not uncommon for
a single live channel today to consist of several
MPEG DASH, HLS and RTMP payloads delivered
to multiple destinations, while also capturing an
archive record of the source into a professional
production format such as ProRes. Just-in-time
packaging (JITP) techniques also help to miti-
gate the number of package formats that must
be hosted within the live stream channel origin,
enabling JITP encryption and conversion to facili-
tate an efficient storage and delivery strategy,
reducing complexity and costs.
Real-time Audience Enticements with Live
Highlights