BBC iPlayer gains content availability, latency boosts
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Editor
| 14 August 2023
As part of what is being described as a “significant under the hood update”, the BBC has revealed that it has improved speed of programme availability and live video on its iPlayer platform.
iPlayer 14Aug2023
The principle upgrade is to ensure programmes are now available to watch on-demand much more quickly than they were before through what the BBC is calling pseudo video-on-demand (VOD). Previously, there was a significant delay before a programme became available after it was broadcast. The longer the programme, the longer it takes to process – and being long programmes, and the BBC cited highly popular shows Strictly Come Dancing and Match of The Day (MOTD) could leave viewers waiting for quite a while before being able to watch them on demand.

Rather than processing the whole programme once it’s finished, the pseudo VOD system reuses the live segments of live iPlayer video to create a temporary on-demand video instead, which can be published as soon as the programme ends. This says the BBC plugs the gap between a live programme and iPlayer VOD availability while its works on processing high quality on-demand video as it did before, and once this is ready to replace the temporary video.

The second update is to reduce the streaming latency of live programmes on iPlayer. Previously viewers watching live streams may have found they were lagging about 80 – 120 seconds behind the TV broadcast. The new upgrades are said to have allowed the BBC to reduce this lag by 20 seconds, meaning viewers will now typically only be around 60 seconds behind the TV broadcast.

The BBC revealed that the technology it previously used to prepare video for live streaming took “quite a long time” to prepare and that this time was quite variable. That meant it had to give the latency quite a bit of padding to allow for the worst case preparation. It has now replaced these systems with newer ones, which take a shorter and more predictable amount of time to prepare each segment reducing the latency, while remaining confident viewers will still get a reliable, stable, uninterrupted viewing experience.

Explaining why it had only now made this improvement, the BBC said viewing experience reliability had always been and remained a top priority, and this is what had previously held it back from cutting latency. However, it stressed that while keeping reliability as the top priority, there are still improvements it could make to reduce this 60 second lag even further.

In addition, the BBC assured that in the coming months it would be looking at further improvements it could make to its existing infrastructure, as well as working on implementing additional improvements have the potential to bring streaming latency much closer to that of TV broadcast.