BBC Expands Low Latency Video Streaming Trial on iPlayer Service
The BBC’s Research & Development division has extended the testing period and increased the number of devices able to take part in their beta trial of “low latency streaming” on their iPlayer service. This aims to reduce the delay on live TV shows/events that exists between terrestrial broadcasts and streamed content.
The delay on iPlayer, which partly occurs due to all the extra processing and connectivity that’s needed to stream a live broadcast, has reduced significantly in recent times but is still around 40 seconds, though it is not the same for all viewers. Many streaming services today have similar delays. By comparison, the BBC’s broadcast services deliver an end-to-end delay of around just 8-10 seconds.
The new testing phase will allow the BBC to measure more precisely how well low latency streaming performs outside of their lab and in people’s homes, across different networks and conditions. “It’ll also help us to understand what it takes to deliver live content online as fast and reliably as broadcast,” said the BBC earlier this week (here).
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Melissa Darragh, Senior R&D Engineer at the BBC, said:
“As of this week, we’re entering a new phase designed to broaden device support and extend the hours of operation. This is so we can reach more reliable conclusions about how low latency streams behave in the home, at scale. This will also increase participation from homes with different internet service providers, Wi-Fi setups, and network stress patterns. Low latency puts the player closer to the ‘edge’ of what the network can support; so, diversity in real-world conditions really matters.
Extending when the trial is available lets us capture performance through different live moments such as sports, music, or breaking news, as well as across weekdays and weekends. This will result in a larger and richer dataset, which will allow us to measure smaller differences in performance.
Working with the teams responsible for our TV iPlayer product, we have once again arranged for a low latency stream to be available via iPlayer beta.”
The table of supported devices now includes a couple of Amazon Fire TV Sticks, BT’s TV Box Pro, the Sky Glass Gen 1 TV(s) and various TV models from Bush, Sony and Toshiba. But the BBC acknowledges that this is still very much a work-in-progress trial and “more work is needed before we could deliver a fully resilient fault tolerant low latency stream at the scale needed for a major sporting event.”
Anybody who wants to give this a go on a supported device merely needs to switch-on iPlayer Beta in the settings and watch BBC Two live – the trial stream is currently available from 8am – 10pm BST for viewers who have set their location to England or Scotland. It is expected to run for around a month. Credits to Thinkbroadband for spotting this development.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Before they spend resources on this almost non-issue. You would think they could bother to make subtitles work in any form on Apple TV boxes.
It’s only one of the most popular devices and been around for almost 10
Years at this point. Still basically shipping the original version of the app – no 4K support, no HDR nothing.
Every other streaming provider manages to build universal or feature parity apps except the BBC. Subtitles support in particular is crucial for accessibility reasons which they are ignoring and discriminating against those users.
For now I am having to run a HD Home Run and record to a DVR hosted on my server. At least one benefit I have noticed the picture quality (bitrate) on broadcast Freeview is still higher than the streaming version. L
The fact that there is an app at all on Apple TV is something. The underlying APIs and streaming constraints of Apple are a bug bear to developers. The iPlayer team commented originally the reasons as to why, but can’t find the article. Most of the other apps are basic on Apple TV too. I do have one. Anyway, according to general comments on here, nobody watches the BBC in the UK do they.
As for bit rate on streaming vs Freeview, you are incorrect. Using a TV device, the bit rate is either equal to or better than Freeview from iPlayer. It’s deinterlaced into 50 frames and variable bit rate up to 12mbs. Freeview HD can be anything from 3.5mbps to 8mbps on average using H264. It’s stat muxed, so bit rate depends on content type (an allocated table of bit rate) and what else is using bit rate on the multiplex. Where Freeview is better, is that it gives AAC 5.1 if the programme is created with it, and broadcaster licensed to transmit it. iPlayer is still 128kbps Stereo and that is to do with issues around sync delay with 5.1 and streaming packets in chunks might be out of order. I think its more of an issue with live content.
They recently added subtitle support to IPlayer on the Apple TV, it’s not very good and doesn’t follow the styles set in the accessibility settings – but it’s there and a lot of other apps don’t follow this setting either.
We’re still missing 4k and HDR though.
That is because the Apple TV app is made by one contractor in scandinavia, and not by any of the in house teams.
Hi John,
It is new, but iPlayer on Apple TV now has subtitles.
https://www.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/1mcbaxf/uk_bbc_iplayer_now_has_working_subtitles/
It would be better if they spent some money on working out how to deliver better audio than just Stereo. We are a quarter of the way through the 21st Century…
It’s annoying for people like me with home cinema setups but as it seems like very much a minority sport these days there probably isn’t enough call to spend the money doing it.
Presumably this will potentially translate through to Freely as well. I haven’t tried Freely yet but I guess it has the same lag issues as iPlayer.
For me, latency is seldom and issue. Maybe for a national real time event, otherwise does a few seconds or even minutes matter? Would be better to concentrate on availability and quality of service.
I used to work for Microsoft on Beam/Mixer but BBC can easily get that latency as low as 125 ms if they used latest technology.