Standard HLS has 15-30 seconds of latency between the streamer’s action and the viewer seeing it. For a live sports match, that’s an eternity. Viewers checking social media see the goal before they see it on stream. Low-latency HLS and related approaches cut this to 2-5 seconds.
Where the Latency Comes From Standard HLS segments are 6-10 seconds long. The viewer’s player buffers 2-3 segments before playing. That’s 12-30 seconds of buffering before a single frame plays.
A streamer broadcasts at 1080p60 on a 6Mbps upload. A viewer on a mobile phone with a weak signal can’t play 6Mbps video. A viewer on a 4K TV would love more. The platform needs to serve the same stream at multiple quality levels simultaneously. That’s what transcoding at ingest does.
The Ladder A “bitrate ladder” is the set of quality levels a stream is available in. A typical ladder:
Broadcasting live video starts before CDN distribution, before transcoding, before viewers. It starts with getting the video from the streamer’s machine to your servers reliably. That first hop, from broadcaster to origin, is where RTMP fits.
RTMP: Designed for Live RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) was created by Macromedia in the early 2000s for Flash video. It’s old. It’s also still the standard ingest protocol for live streaming because it solves the ingest problem well.
Every phone running Google Maps is a sensor. It sends GPS coordinates every few seconds. Aggregate enough of those pings from enough phones on the same road, and you can calculate actual vehicle speeds. That’s where the red and yellow lines on the map come from.
The Pipeline Each GPS update includes a location, timestamp, and device ID. The system needs to:
Map the coordinate to a road segment. A phone at (37.
Every trade generates a tick: a price, a volume, a timestamp. An active stock might generate thousands of ticks per second. Distributing that data to thousands of subscribers simultaneously is its own problem.
What Tick Data Looks Like A tick is small: instrument ID, price, quantity, timestamp. The volume is the problem. During market open or a news event, tick rates spike dramatically. Subscribers range from high-frequency algorithms (latency-sensitive, need every tick) to dashboards (showing “current price,” don’t care about ticks they missed).
User starts watching in 1080p. They walk into an elevator. Bandwidth drops. The video freezes and buffers. Adaptive bitrate streaming would have dropped to 480p and kept playing.
How to capture and stream database changes in real-time. CDC patterns, implementation approaches, and when to use it instead of application-level events.