Softvelum Low Delay Protocol support for low latency live streaming

Get ready for Flash farewell in 2020 and further decline of RTMP. We've created SLDP as an alternative for low latency live streaming. Read this article to learn more about steps to transition from RTMP to SLDP.

Qosifire live streaming quality monitoring service is now available for free trial and production usage.

Qosifire currently supports Icecast audio streaming availability and quality monitoring. More coming soon.

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Softvelum Low Delay Protocol

Low latency is an important issue for live streaming industry. Many use cases need lowest possible delay in delivery, such as security, online chats, gaming, bidding and more.

Currently RTMP is the leading technology for providing low latency playback. However, Adobe will stop support for Flash technology in 2020 which will cause the RTMP playback decline. With Flash and RTMP being declined by the industry, there is a need for real-time delivery protocol supported on multiple platforms.

Softvelum introduces SLDP - a last-mile delivery protocol to provide sub-second delay between media server output and user playback.

SLDP is based on WebSockets for transmission over HTTP/HTTPS.
Sub-second delay between origin and player.
Codec-agnostic - you can stream H.264, H.265/HEVC, VP8 and VP9 to the platforms which support the playback.
Real-time adaptive bitrate (ABR) is supported to allow switching channels nearly instantly. It takes just a GOP time to start new rendition playback.

SLDP ads insertion live demo

Here you can play SLDP live stream with ads insertion in our free HTML5 player.

Find out more on Nimble Advertizer Live Demo page.

Transmuxing and transcoding for SLDP

Nimble Streamer takes most popular protocols as input for further processing. They are RTMP, RTSP, MPEG-TS, SRT, UDT, HLS, Icecast and SHOUTcast. Once the data is received it can be transmuxed into all supported live streaming protocols which include SLDP among others.
Server passes though the content without changes in case of transmuxing, so whatever the original protocol carries, it will be brought via SLDP to a client.

Live Transcoder can be used in this pipeline in cases when some content transformation is needed. This might be downscaling for ABR, filtering, re-sampling, changing profile or whatever else is needed. Transcoder produces H.264 or H.265 (HEVC) video with AAC or MP3 audio so the target platform should be able to play that.

If the ABR SLDP stream is produced, each single bitrate stream within ABR stream may use its own codec or different profile of the same codec. So your FullHD streams may use high profile and other lower resolution streams will use H.264 baseline.

SLDP setup in Nimble Streamer

From scenarios setup perspective, SLDP is just one more protocol in our bundle.
Use this article as a setup reference and this FAQ article for some specific details.

Amazon CloudFront has full support for WebSockets which means SLDP can be delivered via CloudFront network seamlessly.
Take a look at CloudFront setup for SLDP delivery to learn more about proper settings.

Also, leanr more about ABR streams setup for Nimble Streamer output.

Browser support

SLDP can be played in HTML5 browsers with MSE on support using SLDP HTML5 player.
You can also add playback to your own players using JavaScript SDK.

Mobile support

Mobile SDKs for Android and iOS are available for adding playback capabilities to your own apps. This includes SLDP and RTMP support.
Visit our SLDP players page to see what you can use on client side.

Server-Side Ads Insertion

Nimble Advertizer supports inserting of advertising into SLDP live streams on server side. This means you can have ads in your SLDP streams regardless of the viewer's platform and player.
Advertizer allows implementing your custom business logic for pre-roll and mid-roll with user-specific insertion.
Visit Advertizer page for technical specs and other details.

Snapshots

Usage snapshots show examples of combined usage of Softvelum products with SLDP technology.