Twitch Interactive, Inc.

Chih-Chiang Lu

Abhinav Kapoor

Yueshi Shen

Eran Ambar

Jorge Arturo Villatoro

Cyrus Hall

Andrew Francis

Yuechuan Li

Spencer Nelson

Martin Hess

Shawn Hsu

Jeffrey Garneau

Jyotindra Vasudeo

Techniques for low latency streaming, for example in a broadcasting environment, are described herein. In some examples, a playlist may include both currently encoded segments, which are segments that are fully encoded at or before playlist generation, and also future encoded segments, which are segments that have not yet been fully encoded at playlist generation. In some cases, the inclusion of future encoded segments in a playlist may result in a player requesting a segment that has not yet been fully encoded at the time that the request is received by the server. In some examples, even though the segment is not yet fully encoded, the server may nevertheless save and process the request, for example by transmitting encoded portions of the requested segment as those portions are made available by the encoder.

Streaming playlist including future encoded segments

Techniques for low latency streaming, for example in a broadcasting environment, are described herein. In some examples, one or more individual renditions may be encoded into multiple rendition versions associated with different respective latencies. Also, in some examples, one or more individual renditions may be encoded into multiple rendition versions having different respective amounts of forward error correction (FEC), for example by an edge node of a video streaming service. Also, in some examples, video may be broadcast using a protocol that does not require retransmission of lost packets, such as Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), which is commonly used for point-to-point transmissions. Also, in some examples, one or more servers may receive quality of service feedback information from each player to which video content is transmitted. The one or more servers may use this feedback information to select and switch between appropriate renditions and rendition versions for each player.

Server-based encoded version selection

Requesting transmission of future encoded segments

Intra-rendition latency variation

Forward error correction for low latency streaming

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Chih-Chiang Lu