2020年3月19日
By 克里斯艾伦 Red5Pro首席执行官兼技术联合创始人
博客

5 Ways the Coronavirus Business Impact Permanently Changes Live Video Streaming

The worldwide spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), 是在改变人们互动的方式吗, 看娱乐节目, 在世界各地工作. The need to contain the virus by reducing person-to-person contact has pushed companies to move conferences online (or cancel them), 减少商务旅行, and ultimately allow their workforce to telecommute. Public health concerns have also resulted in changes to how we experience our entertainment, with concert and sports cancellations in order to avoid gatherings of large crowds. Even schools have closed to avoid further transmission.

而 many of these changes are temporary, some will have longer-lasting implications. Here's a look at how this novel coronavirus changes live video streaming forever:

虚拟会议增加

One of the biggest concerns regarding coronavirus's business impact is the need to eliminate or reduce the in-person interactions often necessary for conducting business. 为了保持生产力, physical communication must be transferred to virtual communication. To address this concern, companies have adopted virtual conferencing solutions. This shift has already greatly increased the demand for live streaming platforms such as Hopin or 变焦. The weeks to come will only further increase this demand lest most productivity grind to a halt.

Hopin 是一家总部位于伦敦的初创公司，提供 all-in-one live online events platform for up to 100,000 attendees from anywhere in the world who can connect, 学习, 并相互交流.

"We want to make sure everyone can experience the same great benefits of events—the connection you made bumping into someone in a breakout session, the potential customer you met at your booth or the awesome tip you got from a panel speaker—without having to physically attend,联合创始人兼首席执行官约翰尼·布法哈特说.

Hopin is focusing heavily on conference organizers who may not want to cancel their events altogether and it is looking to help them run their proceedings through its platform. Physical events that have already moved to online-only include the 广域网峰会纽约Salesforce的 2020悉尼世界巡回赛，和日内瓦国际车展.

为了克服这一挑战, virtual conferencing solutions will need to be able to scale-up to support millions of users and provide true interactivity by keeping latency below 500 milliseconds (ms).

而变焦也被用来取代会议, and it’s doing very well because of this new use case, 变焦 is proving to be more of a stop-gap solution that doesn’t address the level of interactivity that would replace a physical conference. For this reason, there’s tremendous interest in conferences moving to true virtual events platforms.

远程办公现在是一种常态

Some workspaces may not have the same attendance as large conferences, but an office can present many of the same concerns for transmission of the coronavirus. Employers are mitigating this risk by allowing employees to telecommute. 而 this may not be a new thing for software companies, it surely is for many others in sectors like education, 公共管理, 和金融. This new way of working has moved the interaction between team members to platforms like 变焦 and it is not surprising that its stock 增加了75% this year, making it one of the best-performing stocks.

以及视频会议解决方案, employers need a reliable way to connect with their employees and keep their teams connected when telecommuting. 动态信号就是这样. It is an inclusive, easy-to-use platform that can distribute messages across communication channels. Every employee can be heard with features such as comments, 喜欢, 聊天, and user-submitted content while also allowing businesses to collect feedback with targeted surveys and polls. 动态信号还提供实时视频流, allowing CEOs and other managers of large companies to address their hundreds of thousands of employees right from their smartphone’s camera.

As more businesses familiarize themselves with online communication technologies, 远程办公将逐渐成为常态.

娱乐

The coronavirus has resulted in the banning of people from congregating in large or even small groups. This obviously affects live events such as 音乐会, sports and live shows.

体育赛事也受到很大影响. 截至3月13日, NBA暂停了赛季, 欧足联已经推迟了所有比赛, the London Marathon has been moved from April 26th to October 4th, and many other associations and competitions are following suit.

虽然取消比赛是第一个解决方案, the ultimate one may be to play without fans physically attending in stadiums while broadcasting the events online. A similar approach may be taken to 音乐会 or other live events.

The keys for the success of this approach are low latency and high scalability. The ability to scale to millions of concurrent viewers will be mandatory for any sport or other live events such as 音乐会, to make sure that their very large fan bases will not be disappointed and upset.

Low latency will be essential not only to improve the viewer experience and make them feel like they are a part of the action, 但也要防止剧透. If different providers have a latency of multiple seconds, then Tweets and text messages can spoil the excitement. 与WebRTC, it’s possible to have latency under 500 milliseconds, which creates real-time latency and full interactivity. 已经是一个在线平台, esports and video game streaming services depend upon low latency to ensure that everything stays in sync and that fans commenting on player interactions correspond to the action on the screen.

Furthermore, stream quality will be important as well. Poor scalability can result in the stream freezing continuously, or maybe not delivering at all … until the last few decisive seconds when you miss the final point and the stream just skips ani-climatically to the final score. 特性 such as ABR and transcoding will ensure that the best quality stream is sent to viewers in response to their current bandwidth.

Participants need to see and hear what is happening as it happens. 如果处理得当, the cameras moving through the event will make your viewers more than passive spectators. It will elevate them to participants, enveloping them in the events unfolding around them. However, everything needs to flow naturally in order to present a fully immersive experience. 在这个充斥着各种娱乐选择的世界里, ensuring that every fan can watch the event without any negative consequences will be essential to keeping them happy.

教育

K-12学校, 大学, 大学停课数周, the education field is taking notice of live streaming as well. Continuing to educate students is very important and the adoption of distance 学习ing tools will be key to this.

使用直播技术, teachers can broadcast their lesson to students either in a one-to-many stream where the students can watch the teacher and perhaps type in comments and questions, or a many-to-many stream where students can talk directly with the teacher and each other.

Flexible and customizable software solutions may even allow for creating features to help keep students focused, such as switching comments on and off and muting students until the instructor is ready to answer questions. There could even be a feature where students could break out into separate groups to discuss a prompt or reading assignment.

像其他用例一样, educational live streaming depends upon the ability to scale to as many students as needed and low latency for natural conversation and dialogue.

Another concern, especially for international students, would be global availability. 从欧洲或亚洲涌向美国的学生.S.-based school should be able to see the same quality and latency as U.S.的学生. 在数据中心中建立集群, 由不同地区的托管提供商管理, enables for the highest possible performance no matter where the users live.

真正的互动体验

The ability to provide an interactive experience will be fundamental to the long-term success of video streaming technologies. In fact, creating just a passive viewing experience is not enough. The only way for true interactivity is to use live streams with real-time latency so that users can communicate easily and naturally as if they were in the same room. This is especially important for solutions that aim to replace in-person conferences, 音乐会, 或者体育赛事, since one of the main reasons attendees go is the interaction that they provide.

2020 will certainly be a growing opportunity for streaming companies, 延迟和规模将是至关重要的. 而 handling a few hundred or a few thousand viewers may not be too hard, supporting hundreds of thousands or several millions is a different story especially when aiming for end-to-end latencies below 500 ms. The complete coronavirus business impact will become clear in the future. Right now it is clear that the need for low-latency solutions that support millions of viewers will push the live video streaming industry forward and further improve the products already achieving such standards.

Once people experience true interactivity and real-time streaming with these virtual events, there will be no going back to passive experiences with 30+ seconds of latency.