Big sports events challenging for live video

One of the biggest challenges for live video broadcast is big sports events. Jossi Fresco Benaim, Head of Regional Sales for Latin America at Verizon Media Platform, expressed that these events that on average have an audience of 2.3 to 3 million, are a challenge in terms of maintaining the delivery quality. He gave the example of the live e-sports event, Legion of Legends, to which up to 24 million people connected.

Fresco was part of the panel “Benefits and challenges of live video broadcast,” of the NEXTV CEO LatAm together with Alexandro Campos, CTO of Blim and Marcelo Liberini, VP of Digital at Caracol TV.

Liberini agreed that sports events, as well as live news “, cannot be compared to anything” and what is yet to be solved is the problem of latency.

Fresco explained that in the past IBC they unveiled a Smartplay and SmartRouting system that helps improve the delivery.

For his part, Campos said that Blim spent three years as a VOD platform and that the topic of live is something very recent. “What led us to this change is that consumers are looking for different dynamics with the OTT. Scalability and stability have been challenges for him in live,” he added.

Liberini explained that although the platform is not focused on cloud gaming, they have their eyes on it, they feel that with geo-localized servers, they can minimize latency. “In e-sports with geo-localized tournaments, all the players have the same latency,” he clarified and explained that latency in the same city is minimal.