The last few years have seen a colossal rise in live streaming across all spheres of life. From political events, to corporate communication, to virtual congregations, to gamers streaming over Twitch. The allure of live streaming lies in its honesty, engagement, and immediacy. Nothing has been pre-recorded: what viewers see on their screen is happening in real-time.
No matter where they are in the world, live stream viewers are a genuine part of the event. They can also typically chat with fellow viewers, building a sense of community around a shared experience. This engagement is why live streaming is such a powerful tool for event managers and broadcasters across sectors and industries.
But for all its benefits, live streaming is not without some key challenges. Let’s explore some of the most common live event broadcast challenges, along with their respective solutions.
1. Delivering high stream quality
Given the proliferation of streaming, viewers have come to expect high quality audio and video, along with low latency, as a baseline. This expectation is only amplified for broadcasters, whose entire business model is geared around delivering such media to their customers and their viewers. If a live event stream buffers excessively, has distorted audio, or is only available in a low resolution, viewers’ low tolerance for poor quality will quickly lead them elsewhere. This presents a challenge to broadcasters, as stream quality relies on many factors that need to align perfectly. Furthermore, for more established broadcasters, live video over the internet doesn’t necessarily benefit from traditional broadcasting technology and infrastructure.
To solve this challenge, broadcasters need to ensure their technology stack is tailored to live broadcast, with measures in place to ensure secure, reliable, low-latency, high quality video and granular reactive quality control. Caton Technology offers an ecosystem of hardware and software solutions dedicated to ensuring the delivery of such high quality video. Learn about our Create & Publish Video solutions.
- Using the right equipment
As we touched on earlier, you need the right equipment to deliver a high-quality live event broadcast over the internet. Without the right encoder and decoder hardware, for instance, your team might struggle with quality issues, conflicting video file formats, or a high latency or network bitrate consumption. This challenge is twofold: first, identifying which available technology is best-suited for your live event broadcasting needs. Then, you need to find a reliable vendor and set the equipment up in a functional workflow.
Caton Technology can help you on both fronts. Our specialists can help you determine your exact equipment needs and then get your team set up to deliver premium live broadcasts to viewers all over the world.
- Internet performance and stability
Another challenge facing live event broadcasts involves internet performance and stability. Unfortunately, even if you have state-of-the-art equipment and perfectly produced content, all of this can fall flat if the internet connection you’re relying on is slow or unreliable. Furthermore, the quality of your live stream can also be jeopardized by the internet connection of your viewers.
To solve these challenges beyond simply ensuring high-performance internet connectivity on site, broadcasters can invest in technology solutions that standardize video quality over a wide range of connectivity strengths. Our proprietary Caton Transport Protocols (CTP) offers one such solution. Using advanced error-correction algorithms and deep machine learning, CTP ensures stability, quality, and security for video, media, and other data transmissions across even the most challenging networks.
- Integration with OTT audience viewing platforms
Another challenge involves audience viewing preferences; specifically, their choice of media platforms. If your target audience uses a certain website or application as their go-to online video streaming platform, such as YouTube or Facebook Live, then your broadcasting team needs to ensure integration with that platform. Otherwise, your content will only gain a fraction of its potential viewership.
To solve this challenge, ensure your live event broadcasting equipment facilitates OTT content delivery. For instance, the Caton Live is a versatile encoder and decoder that’s been purpose-built for live video streams. The device offers all the functionality and flexibility you’ll need for a successful live event broadcast.
Partner with Caton for live event broadcasting success
At Caton Technology, we help broadcasters across the world to connect with their viewers better. Our hardware and software solutions, along with our underlying CTP and CVP technology, can help you deliver better content, more reliably, and to more people, while reducing cost.
Avex Pictures selects Caton Technology's solution to stream live content to cinema chains globally.
If you would like to take your live event broadcasting to the next level, our team is always available to chat. Contact a member of the Caton team today.
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