Stream Live Event has a 50 second delay

Brass Contributor

We are using the External Encoder support sending the video through OBS and we are experiencing a 50 second delay. We have a Yammer chat going on beside the video feed and we do a QA segment during the broadcast that the hosts respond to on video. It gets difficult to plan for questions that may come in after 50 seconds from the delay and then have the people in the broadcast respond to their questions that were entered through Yammer. It would be great if MS could reduce this delay time. I compared delays from competing products leveraging OBS and Stream has the longest delay.

 

Stream - 50 seconds

Vimeo - 10 seconds

Facebook - 12 seconds

Youtube Normal - 15 seconds

Youtube Low Latency - 10 seconds

Youtube Ultra Low Latency - 5 seconds

 

Does anyone have any tips to reduce the delay, or know if MS is planning to reduce the delay time?

15 Replies

When you were playing back the live event and got the 50 second delay what OS and browser where you on?

 

My understanding was that we typically had a delay of about 20-30 seconds so 50 seconds seems higher than my understanding. I'm checking with some folks on our engineering team that own this layer to understand if 50 seconds is normal or not. But they wanted to know the above.

Windows 10 Pro - Teams Desktop Application/IE/Chrome (Teams)/Chrome (Stream Site)

Mac OS 10.13.6 - Teams Desktop Application/Chrome (Teams)/Chrome (Stream Site)

iPhone Xs Max 12.1.1 - Teams iOS App/Safari (Stream Site)

 

I attached a screenshot where you can see OBS on the right streaming an internet clock. Top Left view is Teams and bottom is Stream. You can see the delay in the broadcast equalling around 50 seconds. I loaded the Teams Live Event on Teams on my iPhone and it was the same delay.

 

Here is a link to a desktop recording of the delay.

https://youtu.be/rINXmPJ96-s

 

 

 

Thanks for the extra info. I'm passing it on to our engineering team that knows this layer to find out if 50 seconds is within expectations or if it's higher than we'd expect.

@Marc Mroz Is there any update on the latency? We're trying to use an external encoder as well for our company presentations and we're having the same issues with 30-40 seconds of delay between the encoder and the livestream. It makes it really hard for our work from home staff to engage in the presentation.

I have found that when encoding for HLS that 30-40 second delay is normal. We get around this by prompting for local questions/interaction until the content reaches our remote audience, not ideal but it works.  Hope this helps.

 

From http://www.wowza.com/blog/hls-latency-sucks-but-heres-how-to-fix-it

 

"When changing an adaptive stream in HLS, it demands a new buffer to be built. At the time of this article, Apple defaults to 10-second content chunks and a certain number of packets to create a meaningful playback buffer. This results in about 30 seconds of glass-to-glass delay seconds from capture to final packet assembly. But, when you introduce CDNs for greater scalability, you inject another 15-30 seconds of latency so the servers can cache the content in-flight – not to mention any last-mile congestion that might slow down a stream."

 

More about HLS from Encoding.com

https://www.encoding.com/http-live-streaming-hls/

If Microsoft Stream is using HLS to distribute the livestream, then I hope we would get another solution for smaller audiences like RTMP or WebRTC. What we need for meetings is something responsive for interaction.

 

But the wait for the stream to catch up is a great idea. Definitely something we'll do for the next presentation. Thanks for the trick.

@JacobSteentoft 

 

I see roughly 65 seconds of delay. If I stream thru Azure Media Services directly, that drops to roughly 40 seconds. I agree, its way too long. I'd love a low latency option similar to YouTube. 

 

-Loren

We are also seeing this in Australia (If that matters) And again we are wanting to move our meetings to this platform from Zoom however the Delay makes it impossible to engage remote people is live conversations via the chat functions.

 

Even Youtube is < 5 seconds delay.

@Cameron_TP 

 

Did anyone find an answer to this puzzle.  Our live events have about a 50 second delay.

@Marc Mroz 

 

Is there a solution to the delay for live events or is that a future road map item

@Lee_Jones 

 

There's no solution other than working around the delay for now. They did make an announcement that they were going to switch to the Azure CDN soon, but no mention if that would help the issue.

Well according to this article, Live Events are using Azure CDN's.  On-demand content does not yet.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/network-overview#cdn-used-for-video-playback 

 

"Live events from Stream and External app or device live events from Yammer/Teams will automatically use Azure CDN."

 

So not sure why their latency is worse than YouTube.  I haven't tested all 3 flavors on YouTube but am assuming that the ultra-low latency setting lowers the buffer time at the cost of quality, while normal adds to it to ensure high quality delivery?

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7444635?hl=en 

@JacobSteentoft 

@Scott Tupper 

That's a bummer, but thanks for correcting me. I was hoping that this would lower the latency. I guess the recent update for Azure CDN is for the rest of the office suite then. Hope one day this will be fixed.

@Marc Mroz I know this is an old post...but bumping into this today.  Very long delays on the platform

l@hovee  Thank you for the side by side comparison!