Background of Live Streaming Services
There are streaming services platform business models such as subscription, donation, and advertorial. This is a new opportunity for live streaming markets and a new era for traditional broadcasting. However, streamers and e-sport promoters do find limitations on reaching a larger number of viewers due to regional ISP service variations. Servers in Singapore are able to provide a good quality broadcast with the fast internet services available from the Singapore ISP service, and Singapore has the hosting infrastructure that is able to serve numerous numbers of live viewers. This paper aims to provide the concept and the infrastructure and explore the possibility of providing a live streaming service platform for streaming games and e-sports events.
YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch have been primary platforms for streamers, content creators, and professional live e-sport tournaments. These platforms have made it convenient for any person to start live streaming for free. Furthermore, these platforms can also reach a worldwide audience and have a big fan base. Streamers and e-sport gamers have become famous through these platforms and have attracted a big count of fans. With the popularity of e-gaming, professional e-sport tournaments have been official games at the Southeast Asian Games and the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games.
Understanding Hybrid Live Streaming
SIs are about bridging the gap between opportunities and capabilities. They utilize human-centric design, connectivity, and data to achieve impact. Live streaming is one way of reaching people and leveraging the ability of digital audiences to share and create conversation. Live streaming Singapore may be experienced in a variety of ways, for different purposes, and in a variety of business models. Crowdfunding and live productions are two popular uses. Live streaming adds authenticity and allows for real-time feedback, creating a sense of immediacy. It builds user community and participant ownership. Hybrid live streaming makes pay-per-view and free events possible. It demonstrates agility in responding quickly to market trends and managing the streaming market, between the need to control digital rights and the wish to harvest digital markets. Livestream services may include transaction services such as e-commerce, chat online with the performer or presenters, advertising of upcoming events, downloads, or the ability to access audience profiling and contextual data insights in the future.
Definition and Components
The service starts when captured audio, video, data attachments, or events from cameras, computers, game consoles, or other digital-ready interfaces were turned into robots and used as digital representations for the sources. These robots are used as the information generation functions and usually include 2D and 3D video, 2D and 3D sound, motion, metadata, presenter’s expression, body gestures, slides, typing, questions and comments, mouse click locations, user poll answers, etc. The sum of these encoded controller instructions would then be sent over networks to the disabled users. These robots would be decoded and played accordingly with a decoder. Playback can be synchronized with the original live event and follow the authoring instructions. The digital data for 2D and 3D video and sound are also known as the multimedia tracks, which can be presented according to what is called a presentation scenario or broadcast script. The principles behind the coding and decoding are known as the lossy embed encoding and decoding principles. For impact factor, the schemes for bit rate control, slicing, key frame identification, etc. are species. Data rate adaptation would be essential to maximize the number of users that the hybrid streaming media can accommodate on a single broadcast channel.
What exactly is a hybrid live streaming service? It is a blend of on-demand streaming and real-time live streaming, offered at different degrees of screen resolution, bandwidth, response time, user base number, and cost. Sometimes, the live streaming can be two-way and communicate directly with the source. Audio podcast and video podcast, such as Digital Railway, also come under the range of hybrid live streaming services. In Singapore, hybrid live streaming is available mainly to students in higher education, followed by businesses and corporations. Due to the tight co-work between the live streaming and the user, usually the service provider is also known as the enabler. The term hybrid live streaming service is widely understood to include RealVideo, RealAudio, QuickTime, WebEx, WindowsMedia, Apple iTunes, and others. To make full use of the available network infrastructure, content can be displayed from a single, client-initiated Network Access Server (NAS), caching server, and/or network appliances.
Benefits of Hybrid Live Streaming Services
Reach the world Globalization has long been in play and being globally connected is easier and more accessible than ever. With this joins the next biggest pro of hybrid live streaming services – the ability to reach a global audience. Boundaries are no longer a limit to the hybrid broadcast format. Audience members both local and abroad will now be able to attend or participate in the event from the comfort of their own home or office. This ease and convenience to attend an event encourages interactions within the global community audience.
Cost-saving When discussing the benefits of hybrid live streaming services, the most obvious advantage of this service is its cost-saving feature. Holding physical events can be costly with the added expenses of venues, audio-visual equipment, decorations, meals, transportation, and miscellaneous administration fees. Limited to just your in-house attendees, one of the unique draw-in factors of physical events is that it has limited entry availability, for exclusive participants only.
We have previously discussed the various virtual events that can benefit from a hybrid live streaming service. Be it private events, trade shows, live streaming concerts, parties, or increasing corporate social responsibility (CSR), these are all possible with the help of a live venue format in a virtual event. Moving on, let’s take a look at the various benefits of a hybrid live streaming service in Singapore.
Enhanced Audience Engagement
Content creators have long faced the dilemma of how to monetize digital content. This is increasingly pertinent in the age where content is so easily spread, or distributed at the touch of a button. One way is to make content affordable and easily accessible. However, there is a counter argument to this, which is to make the content as exclusive as possible to create a large enough paying audience. This is where live streaming comes in. It brings to the consumer the exclusivity and being at the event, without physically having to be there. The concept of live streaming replaces the traditional concept of having to be somewhere to be able to participate. This change can be leveraged on to create enhanced audiences for many events.
We can capitalize on streaming technology to enhance audience engagement. The trend is for content to be premium and exclusive, similar to high-end sports or cultural events. The ability to provide niche and exclusive content instantly and live is a strong pull for consumer engagement. Technology, specifically live streaming, enables these niche content to reach media consumers anywhere in the world, instantly. Imagining reality shows with a global voting participation, or an invitation to the exclusive behind the scenes party for a few selected viewers. These are the opportunities that internet technologies like live streaming offer.
Challenges and Solutions in Implementing Hybrid Live Streaming Services
Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time much as live broadcast results of live sport events, musical concerts, political debriefs, demonstrations, religious masses, presentations, and class lectures. The term live streaming refers to Internet websites and applications that people use to stream live content in real-time, hence the term streaming is used to describe when a user is transmitting a video in real-time. Over the past one and a half years, the Tourism Services Standard Committee (TSC)’s Conferences and Meetings Organizers Standard Technical Subcommittee (CMO STS) studied and developed based on the meeting and event industry needs a new product. This new service explores a relationship with traditional face-to-face meeting, workshops, and seminars and is the revolution of meetings and events, creating new and great opportunities for both meeting organizers and participants.
An upcoming trend for the hybrid live streaming event is to develop the ability of the hybrid meeting to broadcast the session to the virtual community in a live streaming format. This service can reach global audiences without any geographical limitation and overcome time zone challenges. The ITSC subcommittee proposed to develop a live streaming product that could hit the global market. By doing this, we can help to maintain the strong reputation of Singapore in organizing international events. Many challenges have to be addressed to come up with reliable and scalable services. In this chapter, we would like to share our experience and the lessons learned after fighting two battles. The first one took place in 2015 regarding the live streaming from a single-venue event broadcast to a global audience. Later we discussed the requirements, design, and implemented a hybrid live streaming solution that was used to broadcast high profile multi-venue and multi-day international conference in Singapore.
Technical Challenges and Solutions
The main contribution of the PTZ-Radio project was to offer a new radio-based but low-delay wireless platform that allows the user to control the PTZ cameras’ action during live event broadcasting.
Each Remote Transceiver Unit (TRU) and Remote Receiver Unit (RXRU) system is capable of facing any one or more PTZ cameras and/or RGB DVI Wireless Receiver Units without infrastructural change.
A radio-based remote control, the project provides low-cost and low-complexity based radio-based PTZ control units. This facilitated more flexibility in live streaming camera usage during the live event broadcasting, cheaper fixed camera systems, and a large reduction in equipment logistics and labor effort cost in the setting up and taking down of the camera equipment.
RF remotes tend to be more picky compared to remote control implemented by Keyboard/Mouse/USB in terms of latency. This makes the PTZ-Radio project focus on low latency transfers while maintaining smart device compatibility.
According to the literature that uses HD video over a POF environment or a 100m OM3 optical link with QSFP modules, their POF solutions may not be aptly used for the specific case of simultaneous high-quality video download and white spectrum lighting in branded entertainment venues.
By using a radio-based controller that may control up to 4 PTZ cameras and extending the USB download signal of a PTZ camera with a specially designed fiber optic USB-stretch solution, we provide an RGB DVI image transport solution for more than one camera over the same fiber.
The predominantly USB-based interface of PTZ cameras and the persistent blind spot (camera facing another camera), even with physically separate cameras, make it challenging to set up big or small high-definition multi-camera live streaming setups for live events with the standard physical infrastructure of AV equipment in permanently or temporarily equipped venues.
Case Studies: Successful Implementation of Hybrid Live Streaming Services in Singapore
One potential of hybrid live streaming services is the traditional broadcasting of large market or large events when required and supplementing the remainder of the time with live streaming for a highly targeted or niche audience, both local and international. The ability to fully exploit this potential makes use of the worldwide cloud Content Delivery Network. In order to do that, they have to make use of their CDN partnership with global service providers to stream content and reach a much broader audience. For example, the distribution of Content Geo through global account partnerships allows these clients to extend their local businesses to global businesses.
Several operators in Singapore offer both traditional broadcasting and IP-based content delivery networks. These operators include Starhub. Starhub has a gesture-controlled mobile app that provides a live television feed for services such as MediaCorp and Starhub On Demand. In addition, there is also Mio Stadium and SingTel. SingTel has a hybrid broadcast-Internet based Mio TV service with movies-on-demand. This TV2.0 is integrated with social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. Nevertheless, these operators still mostly focus on the Singapore audience and have yet to fully exploit the potential of hybrid live streaming services worldwide.
