SF Video Tech: Periscope’s Mark Kalman on LHLS Media Streaming

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  Ted CarstensenPlatform Director
  Heavybit

On August 31st, Heavybit Member company Mux held their monthly SF Video Tech meetup at our San Francisco Clubhouse. The event featured a talk by Periscope’s Mark Kalman on the new streaming tech they’ve developed for their users. Sign up here to attend the next SF Video Tech event in person.

Mark Kalman: Periscope LHLS Media Streaming

From the Periscope Engineering blog: Periscope is a live streaming application where viewers respond to broadcasters in real time with comments and “heart” feedback. A major part of the application’s appeal is the interactivity it gives participants. During development, the team found that to maintain interactivity, feedback from viewers needed to arrive to the broadcaster within two-to-five seconds. This placed a relatively tight constraint on media stream latency, defined as the time between an event being captured on the broadcaster side and when it is rendered for the viewer. The challenge for the Periscope video engineering team was to build a system that meets the latency constraint in a way that cost-effectively scales to large audience sizes. Read the full post here.

In this talk, Periscope’s Mark Kalman talks about LHLS, the lower-latency derivative of HLS that Periscope built to reach large audiences while meeting the latency requirements of their interactive application. If you’ve ever tuned into a live stream and been bummed by the slow back and forth with the talent on screen, this technology solves your problem.