Commentary: The Best of All Worlds – Reduced Latency Without The Tradeoffs

Since its inception, Uplynk was developed with broadcasters and content owners to reduce the complexity of managing their traditional video business and streaming initiatives. The idea continues to be that simple. We aim to ensure that media companies can easily scale their operations and grow their audiences without multiple vendor integrations or in-house technology investments with the flexibility to ensure we can work with a variety of existing up and downstream technology platforms already in production with our clients.

That is why our most recent product enhancement, reduced latency, is so exciting. There has been plenty of talk in the industry about ultra-low latency and sub-second behind live times, but all those solutions come with tradeoffs that our customers shouldn’t have to make. Tradeoffs can be anything from increasing cost, delivering pass thru ads, deleting content protection, increasing the potential of rebuffering, or an overall reduction in stream quality. While each may sound like a minimal risk alone, when your goal is to increase brand loyalty and ROI, a content owner shouldn’t have to assume that risk while attempting to meet all their business requirements.

Having recently joined Edgio after many years at a broadcast company, I understand how important it is for content owners to meet viewers’ expectations around latency, quality, and personalization. I’m not just talking about content personalization leveraging AI/ML, but the personalization of ads as well. Viewers want content that feels like it is programmed for them, and not being able to meet that need could risk future monetization opportunities for that viewer. Still, I also know how difficult it is to achieve without sacrificing the quality of one of those requirements or the needs of the business as a whole.

At Edgio, our customers have told us that they require a platform that can balance both the viewers’ and businesses’ needs to monetize effectively, deliver high quality, and achieve reduced latency. That is why the enhancements we have recently announced to Uplynk are so significant. Reduced latency has long been a talking point in the industry. Still, until now, customers have had to sacrifice the reliability of other features to deliver it. Uplynk’s solutions change the game in live streaming, helping media companies deliver the highest quality audience experiences while providing the flexibility to monetize and secure their content fully.

Not only are we reducing the latency at which Uplynk operates to as low as 15 seconds, but we are also releasing new features to improve monetization strategies & user experience.

Advanced Timeshifting

Harnessing the latest streaming protocol specifications, Uplynk enables media companies to provide better quality, television-like streaming experiences for the biggest events with live pause, rewind, and fast-forward capabilities for live streams.

Universal Ad Config

The Universal Ad Config tool makes integrating with any compliant ad server possible, simplifying complex and time-consuming processes. The feature acts as a configuration wizard to remove the need for hard-coded integration, helping media brands reduce time to market and unlock maximum monetization with ad partners of their choice.

Features like these add more complexity to content owners’ technology stack as every day the concurrent viewing numbers surge and viewer expectations increase. Customers trust us to ensure they have best-in-class end-to-end streaming technology while reducing time to market, as evidenced by Uplynk’s latest platform enhancements. Edgio empowers them to free up engineering and operational resources so that they can focus on creativity and audience growth.