Multiview: MediaKind, NBA, and the Future of Live Streaming

MediaKind’s and the NBA’s recent announcements highlight changes in how sports fans engage with live events, by allowing them to watch multiple streams simultaneously. This puts users in control and gives them a more engaging and sticky viewing experience. The NBA app will enable users to stream up to four games at once via NBA League Pass, the league’s live game subscription service.

While these developments underscore that Multiview is hot, they also illustrate the boundaries of these cloud-based transcoding solutions, where a number of feeds are combined into a single stream in the cloud. The number of feeds is typically limited to four with very restrictive  layout options to keep the complexity and number of transcodes manageable.

While this is a great starting point, the industry needs to move beyond this limit to truly give fans the flexibility they crave. Tiledmedia’s Multiview technology offers such a much-needed leap in flexibility and scalability by solving the Multiview puzzle client-side. Fans get way more options and flexibility while service providers need not add any additional cloud-side complexity as compared to just offering a single-view experience.

Solving the problem on the user device has many more  advantage, including:

• Unlimited Stream Views: No device-imposed limit on the number of feeds; Tiledmedia Multiview works even on devices with a single decoder.
• Full Layout Freedom: App designers and users can control the layout without being restricted by encoding settings. UX designers have full power to offer amazing experiences.
• Instant Switching with Continuous Audio: Seamless stream switching without audio drops, since all feeds are handled by one player.
• Frame-Accurate Synchronization: Streams stay in perfect frame-accurate sync.
• Personalization and Scalability: The number of feeds depends mainly on the UI, with modern devices easily handling 25+ streams.
• Bandwidth Efficiency: The player retrieves only visible streams in the necessary resolution, optimizing bandwidth and CDN cost.
• Optimized ABR: A single ABR player engine ensures efficient retrieval, balancing all feeds and doing away with buffering.
• Universal Compatibility: One set of standard HLS ABR ladders serve all platforms and devices.

Read an in depth comparison written by our CTO Ray between the different Multiview solutions here.