Listen to this articleUnreal Streaming Technologies is developing multimedia software since 1998 and focuses on network streaming technology, where they possess experience materialized in algorithms and techniques for transmission of multimedia material over IP networks. The company’s mission is to develop, popularize and market IP streaming solutions for commercial markets as well as for non-profit and educational organizations. Below is our interview with Max Erstein, CEO at Unreal Streaming Technologies:
Q: What are advantages of your Unreal Media Server?
A: Low latency – 0.1 to 2 seconds end-to-end latency.
Ease of configuration and operation – no need to write scripts or edit text files; intuitive GUI Configuration app.
Stability – the server can run for months without restarting while serving thousands of connections a day.
Low resources footprint – very low CPU/memory usage, allowing to co-locate server with other apps on the same machine.
Universality – the server accepts live streams from virtually any streaming protocol and sends out to any player/device.
Q: What are main benefits for your clients?
A: A lot of our clients are video surveillance integrators in law enforcement and video security market. They benefit from stable, unattended, low latency live streaming allowing them to operate seamlessly and react to issues in timely manner. For similar reasons, companies engaged in online sports betting, online auctions and live gaming have integrated Unreal Media Server with their products.
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Q: You’ve recently released version 12.0 of Unreal Media Server; what are main improvements?
A: We have added streaming via WebSockets to HTML5 Media Source Extensions, allowing web browsers to play live near real time video without any plugins. Chrome, IE, Edge, Opera, Safari and Firefox browsers are supported; all mobile devices running Chrome mobile browser are supported too, except iOS devices. By using WebSocket protocol for delivery, as opposed to fetching segments via separate HTTP requests (like MPEG-DASH and HLS protocols do), web browsers can achieve low, sub-second latency streaming, suitable for surveillance and conferencing applications. This technology, finally, realizes the long-awaited ability for browsers to play low latency live audio / video without any plugins such as Flash player or proprietary plugins such as VLC player or our own Unreal streaming player.
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Q: What are your plans for next six months?
A: MSE is still an experimental technology. W3C continues to introduce new requirements to the standard; browsers still fix bugs and try to keep up with the standard by implementing latest recommendations and requirements. Accordingly, in the next six months we plan to continue improving HTML5 live streaming to resolve current issues such as maintaining good a/v sync in the packet loss conditions, and other challenges of low latency live streaming.
Q: Max, how do you see video streaming industry developing in the next few years?
A: “Video streaming industry” is a very broad term. Video streaming over IP is involved in practically any digital application out there. We can divide the “streaming industry” into two main kingdoms: 1. Streaming of recorded content or live content with high latency (live events, sports, concerts etc.) – this is called OTT when applied to public Internet. Numerous cloud-based CDN subscription services compete in the OTT market and continue to develop new delivery and playback techniques. 2. Low latency live streaming for surveillance, security, conferencing applications. Huge number of applications need to support low latency live streaming while only a few public standards and protocols exist to facilitate it, and majority of existing implementations are proprietary and not interoperable.
To address the needs of both kingdoms, number of standards and technologies are being developed by IETF and W3C in parallel, facilitating better compression and delivery of audio/video. Unfortunately, some of the proposed standards are not driven by pure technical considerations, but imposed by big companies and their market battles. For example, Apple keeps HLS as the only browser-allowed streaming protocol on iOS devices, practically forcing streaming producers to use HLS, as iOS devices remain popular in the smartphone/tablet world. Streaming clouds that deliver video to any browser/device, have to transcode and package original video stream to multiple formats and protocols. One of the goals of the streaming industry for the next few years, especially in the OTT video market, is to remove this complexity through unification of multiple technologies into one universally supported standard. MPEG-DASH is the proposed technology and there is no doubt the OTT market is going to fully migrate to MPEG-DASH in the coming years. However, MPEG-DASH is a high-latency protocol (5 seconds is about the best latency), which is perfectly fine for OTT industry, but is not acceptable where low latency is an absolute must. The really interesting question is where the low-latency streaming technology going to go in the next years. We think that WebSockets and Media Source Extensions address the challenge very well so these technologies will become standard for low latency streaming applications in the close future. WebM/WebRTC is another alternative, but we are sceptical about it, mainly because it involves proprietary codecs not used in the encoding market (no IP Camera, DVR box or cable TV channel uses VP9 while all use H.264 for video compression), so there is no actual live content to be delivered over WebM. Also, Vorbis is simply a poor audio codec, especially at low bitrates. In contrary, Media Source Extensions accept and play H.264/AAC encoding which is implemented universally by all encoding software and hardware. The more mature browser’s implementations of Media Source Extensions will become, the quicker Flash and Silverlight will fade out, allowing absolutely plugin-less video playback in web browsers, for both OTT and low latency video streaming.
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