ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent team on improvement to WebRTC’s startup times
Chinese web giants Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance – the latter through its Volcano Engine hyperscale cloud service – have teamed up to create, in their terms, a new video streaming standard. The project was announced at a Chinese conference in late February. The Register has been able to source a little more information than was revealed in the Chinese press at the time. We now know is that the project focuses on ensuring a better experience in the first few seconds of a live stream by reducing the time required to initiate a stream to a single second – or perhaps even half that. The three companies say stream-watchers today need to count for between three and six Mississippis while they wait for streams to start – which is painful for individuals, and intolerable if streams are piped into broadcast platforms. The „ultra-low latency live broadcast protocol signalling standard“ – for that it is the standard’s name – achieves that low latency with innovative signalling techniques between client and server.
