How OTT Services Can Match the Quality of Broadcast

Recent events, such as the 2018 FIFA World Cup, demonstrated that live over-the-top (OTT) experiences have some serious limitations, including low quality on TV sets and a delay of more than 30 sec compared with broadcast services. If the industry does not solve those problems, they could halt the development of live OTT offerings. This article analyzes the current challenges involved with delivering live OTT services and will describe solutions that are available today, such as content-aware encoding, artificial intelligence, and low-latency common media application format (CMAF). In addition, this article will present new concepts that can be deployed as part of an end-to-end OTT solution to further optimize quality of experience for OTT services on existing infrastructure [i.e., headend, content delivery network (CDN), and devices].