Ultra-Object (editing)
Ultra-Object
1. Seeing the invisible
Many platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitch, provide Live Streaming service. While watching Live Streaming, I can easily know and see there is a time difference between the broadcasted screen and chats. When a viewer watches the screen and sends a chat, a broadcaster responds after a few seconds. The time difference(or delay) of Live Streaming sometimes obstructs communication between a broadcaster and viewers, and sometimes makes interesting situations like The Academic’s Bear Claws music video using Facebook Live’s delay. I wanted to know more about Live Streaming process and phenomena caused by this, so I started to research Live Streaming and how Live Streaming works.
Since Live Streaming is a service that is easily accessible and usable, I was able to think about which parts to investigate while using it and observing another person as an observer while she is using it. She often watches Live Streaming of some online broadcasters like YouTubers and watches the news through live broadcasts. I also interviewed her while and after observing the moment that she is using Live Streaming service. I could see her reaction about short and long video latency. She feels an interest in short latency that generally appeared between screen and chat, while feels annoying in long latency.
While I did online research at the beginning, I wandered with many words related to network layers, but after doing that I was able to understand the video streaming process. A post from Wowza was simple and helpful for general understanding: from filming a video to playing it as a content.
As technology is developing, so that high-quality video can be provided, and demand for live streaming service increases, a way of transport video, which is protocol, is also developed to deal with huge data traffic and to enable live streaming with reduced latency.
Adaptive streaming is a technology developed to transfer contents efficiently as having advantages of both, progressive download and streaming. For transferring video, the best quality and low latency are important factors. In adaptive streaming, the client can watch the content while it is being transferred. The content is transferred as segments, so it enables to download the only part that the client needs and to switch between different resolutions and quality efficiently. In Live Streaming, this transfer needs to be done in real-time. The transferring can be done in various ways. The structure of the packets and algorithms define the media streaming protocol such as HTTP Live Streaming(HLS), Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP(DASH) and so on. Each streaming protocol has pros and cons.
/Begen, Ali & Akgul, Tankut & Baugher, Mark. (2011). Watching Video over the Web: Part 1: Streaming Protocols. Internet Computing, IEEE. 15. 54–63. 10.1109/MIC.2010.155.
/A Review of HTTP Live Streaming
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While researching, it is difficult to investigate whether the data I have found is an explanation that applies to recent technology or not, because it is a changing field.
2. Aestheticising the invisible
I started to make a live streaming process visually.
I filmed a short video and made it to some printed frames like a simple flipbook. Flipbook is a book of pictures or drawings that are intended to see as a video or an animation when flipping over fastly. Printing pages represent segments of the video content, for example, a page for a segment or 2 pages for a segment. The segments compressed and transferred through the string to clients.
Making Live Streaming process visually made me think about parcel delivery system. Both transporting systems for segments or parcels have similar parts. Live streaming system has content delivery network(CDN) which enables to get requested content from the close server, not in distance. Likewise, the parcel delivery system has a local terminal or storage to make delivery efficiently. Latency in the physical world?
Many companies are looking at reducing latency. In this way, the human is trying to overcome the limitations of time by using technology.
전화, 인터넷 웹페이지가 뜨는 것, 서로 문자를 보내는 것과 같이 마치 내가 클릭하자마자 일어나는 것만 같은 많은 일들이 시간차를 두고 일어납니다. 우리는 이 시간이 짧아질수록 시간차를 인지하지 못하고 동시에 일어난다 또는 라이브다 라고 느낍니다.
video latency time
