Our expert open-source project, VoVSE, believes that the application of live streaming will significantly accelerate the commercial and research application scenarios’ development. First, InterFrame makes it possible to perform low-level mashup modification to any commercial content protection algorithm by only handling a simple linear method.
The world has several compelling live video performances. However, these In-band DASH solutions tend to be overly fast. It is walkable, but not runnable when fulfilling the rights of commercial content protection. The public tracing of blockchain also needs to submit with the hard disk-related and CPU-bound overhead.
Building on our pioneering spirit in the area of mobile video streaming, recent work has seen the rise of a new computing evolution called Blockchain. In order to protect and manage the entire stack, content creators will encrypt their works using Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption algorithms. The architecture of Hybrid Live Streaming is a straightforward combination of both In-band DASH and blockchain.
In this video, we present hybrid streaming, an approach that innovatively combines both In-band DASH and blockchain technology to enable content-protected live over-the-top streaming using AVC based on second screen-layer and frame-level filtering.
What if you could deliver a live video production, such as an event, press conference, or performance, to any viewer who might be on the local network, in the cloud, or on the public address system in real-time? It would enable more viewers who may not be able to see the physical site in person to enjoy the production. This emphasizes broader application scenarios that would deeply affect the live video industry in the future.
Definition and Concept
Hybrid Live Streaming is a technology that is defined by the provision of live transmission and on-demand streaming from different user-player’s content virtualization forms, controlled by an adaptive bitrate system, and delivered in sync with a level of synchronization guarantees for multi-device application. It is considered hybrid because it combines classes of live broadcasts and video on-demand service models, and it is a high-definition system because it provides quality content and video satisfaction for the end-user. Besides delivering high-quality content, our unified model facilitates the sharing of adaptive content parameters thanks to the Application Layer Multicast, consequently streamlining the user’s devices.
Live streaming is the online broadcast of a real-time video to an audience over the internet. The viewer is able to watch and interact with the stream as it is being sent. The main features of live streaming are that its events or procedures are happening in the moment, but the video is not saved or stored for later. Video is created, but it is not produced to be served as television content. It’s like a live broadcast, but over the internet, from a smartphone. Also, live streaming videos can take different content forms, like streaming of TV shows, audio and video courses, social media live streams, sports, news, and game events, business and marketing live events, column posts, music, among others. According to estimates, 82 percent of all global internet traffic will come from video streaming and downloads by 2022.
Benefits of Hybrid Live Streaming
The name itself suggests: hybrid live streaming, just like hybrid cars, combine two best of both worlds. We are now witnesses to a perfect marriage of sophistication and simplicity, digital and realism. Though the technological building blocks were always present, its deployment on a larger scale to deliver quality events was limited. The very word ‘hybrid’ serves as a measure of its popularity, omnipresence, and intersection in different walks of life. Media and entertainment in the Broadcast era attained a metamorphosis state totally unrecognizable in the digital world. In spite of the lack of proper theater facilities and related acoustics at that time, many properties staged a lot of short-lived ‘talkies’ resulting in severe loss of profits. Similarly, long stage plays or operas are rarely staged at cineplexes. Interactivity during live previewing, cutting, and generating data becomes no worse or better than an average offline 3D feature film distribution platform. Providing personalized sense-augmenting-AR user experiences on a pub front, directed to the specific user is equally challenging but doable.”
“Once upon a time, in-person conferences, high-tech expos, and professional seminars were the norms. As the world embraced technologies and marched towards digitalization and globalization, the last few decades witnessed a marked change in the mode of organizing and attending these events. Online live streaming of the events and charging a fraction, if at all, compared to attending these in-person were made possible, thanks to live streaming technologies. This trend was taken a step forward with the advent of paid online events. In 2020, global pandemic called a halt to organizing in-person events and professionals had their first taste of digital alternatives in a natural way.
Reach and Engagement
Any potential engagement created by a physical event is also possible with a live streaming audience. While the online audience may not be in the room, they are still part of the event. They can meet, interact, engage, share an experience, have conversations, and become part of the landscape and experience. Hybrid live streaming lets participants consume and create content, network, and engage with sponsors and brands. And, with the flexibility and available data, interactions can be better targeted, analyzed, and assessed, bringing real and immediate benefits to brands and sponsors.
Hybrid live streaming can eliminate location, technical constraints, and substantially increase the reach of an event. By connecting the physical location to the online world, hybrid live streaming opens up new markets and new customers. It allows businesses to maximize the value of investments in on-site venues. It does not compete with face-to-face. Instead, it opens up new opportunities for interaction and engagement. In effect, a hybrid event preserves the value of the “original” location and extends its reach into new markets and for new types of experiences.
Live Streaming in Singapore
Singapore houses some creators who live off live streaming as a full-time career. Some of these creators have a fan base who turn up faithfully to every “performance” and even bring fan signs. The more successful ones have sponsorships. Some of the creators are celebrities who had a fan base beforehand, and live streaming Singapore is just another way for them to interact with their fans. With China’s Great Firewall in place, mainstream live streaming platforms such as Huya and Douyu have a complete domestic market and focus entirely on serving the local needs, leaving the Taiwanese-speaking population marginalized. To tap into the market and reach Singaporean audiences who speak Mandarin, we have a complete live streaming ecosystem that is comparable with overseas live streaming platforms.
Singapore is one of the top countries in the world in terms of internet and mobile connectivity. Fast internet connections with large bandwidth and 4G cellular networks cover almost all of Singapore’s landmass and house nearly all of the residents. As a result, Singapore has a huge cohort of live streaming users. Many Singaporeans are live streamers themselves, and the readily available infrastructure would allow us to consider live streaming as a part-time or even full-time occupation without needing to build our own audience. Although overseas live streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube Live are available, the most popular platforms in Singapore are localized platforms, and most of them target the Mandarin-speaking community.
Overview of the Market
There appears to be another power law distribution between users and providers of video content online. The majority of users flock to the same twenty or so video services, each having more than a million monthly users. These and their advertisers are setting the price for video inventory across the internet for long-form video content. They are also dictating the ad units, which are predominantly pre-roll and mid-roll importantly. According to IBbS, viewing of long-form video content is relatively static; you cannot improve engagement by toggling the video quality or measure engagement by measuring the number of seconds of the content viewed.
The video streaming market is pretty straightforward today. You have your tier one players including Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube, followed by a bunch of tier two players like Hulu and other subscription-based services. Then you have your content-driven channels like Roku with Channel Pear, a 500 channel service that offers niche content to users, and ET Live, a service that offers live entertainment news that allows highly customized content around the viewer’s personalities. Finally, the next tier mainly includes content owners that have built online offerings and are now adding ad products to sell or for groups or targeted content owners or advertisers.
Choosing the Right Live Streaming Service
Reliability might be one of the most important things you want to consider. If a live streaming service is not able to deliver your all-important hybrid stream to your audience, it’s all for nothing. Check out if in the past the service experiences often or lengthy downtime, if streaming was supported, and how easy it was to set everything up. Make sure that the live streaming is supported by the browser and device that will be used by the attendees. As a hedge, make sure the service also offers support for HTML5 streaming.
So you have decided on hybrid live streaming, great! There are a lot of live streaming platforms to choose from, and each of them comes with their own benefits and quirks. To make everything a bit more clear, we’ve put together a list of things you might want to consider before diving into your live stream.
Key Factors to Consider
The recent Live Streaming User Experience Recommendations provides a comprehensive set of guidelines to address the first requirement above. It presents an optimal UX for live streamed media, how to use emotion and interest interaction data, audio questions, video AI (artificial intelligence), video analytics, and viewer reaction. A higher target user experience will likely result in the use of newer technology improvements. There are many device, network, geographic location, and content policies that are technology factors for decisions for selection of techniques that satisfy other requirements, such as DRM, local encoding, advertisements, and autonetwork services, higher latency (the time between the real event and a user actually seeing or hearing it), internet repair, local copying, local browsing and low delay, etc. If the cost of the content is very high (but, of course, the required business revenue would be offset by the cost of perfect protection), it may favor the use of local certified equipment, copy protection, and the use of “trusted execution environment” consumer devices in which applications use trusted operating system services, a hardware root of trust or specialized processor chip, to assure processing and storage isolation, encryption and license chain of trust.
The technical and business requirements of each streaming project can be highly variable. Obviously, the business requirements are key to selecting the business partners, whether they are service providers, technology systems vendors, or in-house support staff. Less obvious is the importance of these requirements upon which technologies and technical services will be used. The requirements include the kind and quality of user experience demanded by the event, the target audience and the user’s devices, as well as their numbers and locations. New services require not only newer technology but also new pricing, rights and scheduling agreements, and even new event validation, discovery, and experience guiding services. Experience interaction data needed for producing business intelligence and generation for triggering reaction may also need services or technology to generate or use it.
Best Practices for Hybrid Live Streaming
We will contribute several hybrid live streaming tips from the reflexes of the real businesses we helped with to avoid the lack of interaction between on-site and virtual attendees. Without these tips, you will not engage both sets of attendees and will not achieve any value from enhanced interaction. In fact, you should avoid all non-recorded interactivity between the on-site and the online attendees if you cannot do it properly because the overall comments would reinforce the feeling of exclusion.
Best Practices for Hybrid Live Streaming
Hybrid live streaming encompasses the mixed event approach, taking advantage of both live streaming and events with in-person elements. The majority of content is broadcast live to the online audience, which is glued to it in real-time. In parallel, a small in-person audience attends the event, while large screens and a dedicated coordinator make sure event’s promoters interact with online attendees a few times.
What is Hybrid Live Streaming?
The popularity of live streaming has grown exponentially over the past year. Though hybrid events have become increasingly popular, the flexibility of live streaming is an attractive alternative, allowing a business to connect global teams at a fraction of the time.
Engaging Your Audience
Posting a quiz question per slide or video is another simple way to engage the audience. You can request the participant to post their replies in the chat and then use chat content to generate a word cloud through a simple integrated web service available for most live streaming platforms. You will then display the word cloud on your screen or point it out by the moderator, creating a virtual crowd experience. This technique also leads the way to the topics of the most interest to your audience. Moreover, if your live studio or seminar room is equipped with an LED wall, participative visual exercises like Pictionary or charades can also be played.
To create an engaging and personalized experience, you must ensure clear two-way communication. Your audience should feel like part of the show and, if possible, become co-creators. Interactivity can be achieved through simple online polls or inviting questions in real time. By doing so, you will also gauge your audience’s interests and any immediate requests, concerns, or feedback. It is also recommended to use a moderator to direct an open Q&A session at the end, possibly inviting some audience members to speak live by video and audio.
