What is livestreaming? How does livestream work? What are the benefits of live streaming?
Live streaming is a process that allows a user to share live video and audio content with others over the internet or television in real time. The live stream can be either pre-recorded or live.
It is a method for delivering a video file in pieces, frequently from a distant storage location. Client devices do not need to download the entire video before playing it because only a few seconds of the file are sent over the internet at once.
When a video stream is sent over the Internet in real-time without being first recorded and stored, this is known as live streaming. Live streaming is a common practice in today’s world, including for TV shows, video game streams, and social media videos.
Imagine the difference between an actor performing a memorized monologue and an actor improvising a speech as the difference between regular streaming and live streaming. In the first case, the audience is informed after the content has been created and stored. Similar to live stream, in the latter, the audience sees the content as it is being created by the actor.
Broadcast live streams, which are one-to-many connections that are sent out to numerous users at once, are what are typically referred to as “live streaming.” Instead of the processes used by one-to-many live stream broadcasts, videoconferencing technologies like Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangouts Meet operate on real-time communication (RTC) protocols.
How does livestream work?
The following are the primary actions that occur behind the scenes to explain how does livestream works:
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Video capture
Raw video data, or the visual data that a camera captures, is the foundation of live streaming. This visual data is stored inside the computer to which the camera is connected as digital data, which is essentially just 1s and 0s
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Segmentation
Video contains a lot of digital information, so downloading a video file takes longer than downloading a quick PDF or an image.
All of the video data would have to be sent out over the Internet at once, which would not be feasible. Instead, streaming video is broken up into shorter segments that last a few seconds.
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Compression and encoding
The segmented video data is then encoded and compressed. The redundant visual information is eliminated in order to compress the data.
For instance, if the video’s first frame shows a person speaking against a gray background, the gray background won’t need to be rendered for any subsequent frames with the same background.
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CDN distribution and caching
The live stream needs to be made accessible to the hundreds of thousands or millions of viewers who want to watch it after it has been segmented, compressed, and encoded.
A CDN should distribute the stream so that it can be delivered to numerous viewers in various locations with minimal latency and high quality.
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Decoding and video playback
Every viewer of the stream receives the live stream from the CDN. The segmented video data is received, decoded, and decompressed by each user’s device.
The video then begins to play after the data has been translated into visual information by a media player on the user’s device, which may be an app or a video player built into the browser.
This is how livestream works from a technical perspective.
How to do personal live streaming?
The first thing to do is to decide what platform you want to host on. You can set up your own server, which is the best option but will cost you some money to get a server up and running.
There are also free options, such as YouTube and Twitch, but these are more difficult to manage and less flexible. After you have decided what you want to host on, you then need to set up your equipment to stream.
This includes a camera, a microphone, a video editing program and a streaming service. You can get all of these off the shelf, but most will be overpriced.
You can then get a base package of a streaming service, such as YouTube or Twitch, for less than $20. This will allow you to stream in 720p and you can also live stream with YouTube using your phone.
Wrapping up
Modern techniques are utilized by StudioZ to hasten the delivery of live streams. Some CDNs won’t start serving a video segment to users until the entire segment has been cached.
However, StudioZ is able to serve these segments to numerous viewers simultaneously as they load, saving the users valuable waiting time. Find out more about our live-streaming services here.
