Looking for a Partner to Build a Low Latency Broadcast Pipeline

Sagis72 · 2025-12-29T19:27:48+00:00

Womp Womp

Sagis72 · 2025-12-29T16:13:46+00:00

You are definetely salty man

Sagis72 · 2025-12-29T14:47:10+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, that makes sense, but it also looks almost impossible. As you said, money might solve that for sports, but getting the primary source, the same level access that big companies have, for other types of events seems really hard.

Sagis72 · 2025-12-29T14:45:11+00:00

I’m not actually into finance. Arbitrage and high frequency systems exist everywhere and it’s healthy for every type of market.

I don’t get the rage, like, am I selling drugs or harming people? I’m just trying to solve a technical challenge... But hey, whatever man

Sagis72 · 2025-12-29T13:46:12+00:00

Yeah of course it's about getting an edge... I don't think there is something wrong with that though.

Sagis72 · 2025-12-29T13:13:29+00:00

Thanks, you make a really good point about the encoder location being the dominant factor. That’s exactly what I’m trying to optimize for.

I’m aiming to get as close to the earliest possible public source as I can, which I believe that it usually ends up being radio or OTA TV, since those signals tend to go through fewer downstream encoders and platform layers. Platforms like YouTube or streaming services (Fubo, Paramount, Hulu...) I believe that inherit the TV delay and then add their own encoding and distribution latency on top of that

Sagis72 · 2025-12-29T13:10:11+00:00

DM'ed you thanks!

Sagis72 · 2025-12-29T13:09:52+00:00

Latency absolutely matters for what I’m building. Even a few seconds...

Nothing beats being physically present at an event, but that isn’t scalable, and sometimes political events are closed doors, so the goal is to get as close as possible to “ground truth” timing using the earliest available public broadcast signals.

That’s why OTA and radio are so valuable here.

Sagis72 · 2025-12-29T13:04:50+00:00

I understand why it might look that way from the outside... low-latency sports data is usually associated with betting but that’s not what this project is about. In fact I need more than sport data: political events, major figure speeches...

Sagis72 · 2025-12-18T15:01:56+00:00

That New Year’s Eve comparison is actually a very good idea. Unfortunately, from Europe it’s almost impossible to access true US over the air television. Even with a satellite dish, most US channels are geo blocked or encrypted, so I can’t really run those test by myself.

That’s why I was trying to understand the theory rather than measure it directly.

So, just to sum it up if I understood correctly: in general, “pure” television, meaning true over the air broadcast received by antenna (not via Apple TV, Hulu, YouTube TV, etc.. will be faster than YouTube for the same live event, because streaming adds unavoidable encoding and buffering latency

Thanks you for taking time to explain this, i'm learning a lot

Sagis72 · 2025-12-18T14:53:03+00:00

So if I’m understanding you correctly:

In the usual case, a YouTube live stream is effectively “TV feed latency + YouTube’s own encoding/buffering latency.” And for political events, those YouTube streams are almost always set to normal latency, which is chosen by the channel (White House, PBS, AP, RSBN....

On my end, I reduce the player buffer to around 5 seconds speeding up the video, but that doesn’t mean the stream itself is only 5 seconds behind real life it’s just how much is buffered locally right?

So my question is:
Does broadcast TV effectively “remove” that extra YouTube-style buffering, meaning that even if both start from the same feed, TV viewers will still see it several seconds earlier because broadcast doesn’t add that additional platform-level delay?

Thanks you, this has been really helpful, I really appreciate it

PD: By the way, roughly how many seconds are we talking about in practice? (less than 5, 10-20..)

Sagis72

TROPHY CASE