Low-latency HLS Challenge for the broadcast industry

on 1 July 2022 AWS, CLOUD, HLS, JMETER, LL-HLS, LOAD_TESTING, OTT, PERFORMANCE, VIDEO and Tags: AWS, broadcast, case study, CDN, CLOUD, HLS, Load Test, OTT, UX, Video Streaming with 0 comments

basketball player scoring Low-latency HLS at game

In the broadcast industry, quality of service is important. Performance testing of streaming services helps to improve it and to choose the best options when new features are introduced.

Find out what led Ateme performance teams to choose the UBIK Load Pack streaming solution and the UBIK team to help them in the complex field of performance testing of streaming services including Low-latency HLS.

Success Story from the Broadcast Industry

Ateme enables thousands of the world’s leading content owners, broadcasters and service providers to captivate their audiences with a superior quality of experience through multi-codec encoding, any-format origin/packaging, scalable cloud DVR, audience-aware CDN and revenue-generating dynamic ad insertion solutions.
Find out more: www.ateme.com.

Low-latency HLS challenge

Ateme continuously innovates to maintain a high Quality of Service.

By 2021, the quality team needed to test the performance of low-latency protocols (Dash & HLS) in Ateme’s new products to ensure that they would enable high-quality streaming services.

Ateme’s historical load-testing solution no longer met our needs as it did not perform well on long-lasting live windows. Furthermore, it did not support low latency and had no short-term plan to do so.

It was time to find a new solution and an accurate long-term partner.

Low-latency HLS performance testing solution

Ateme looked for a full-featured solution for streaming load testing that supported low-latency protocols, as well as a partner able and willing to cope with the fast evolution of the OTT market.

During its search, it assessed several solutions, such as Tsung, Httperf, Blazemeter, JMeter & UBIK Load Pack.

After a thorough study process and a POC, Ateme chose the UBIK Load Pack streaming solution and its experts specialized in streaming performance testing.

The solution had already proved its scalability (up to 200 000 VUs), was multiprotocol (Smooth, HLS, Dash) and supported on-premise and cloud installation.

The support of long-lasting live windows was efficient. Low Latency Dash was already supported. The TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the UbikLoadPack video-streaming plugin was low: there was no bundle to be bought with the solution. Access to the new version was included and the upgrade was easy. The maintenance cost was also low.

Thanks to this partnership, the UbikLoadPack team put Low-Latency HLS at the top of their roadmap.

All the performance campaigns performed in the Public Cloud were not possible with previous load-testing solutions. Now with UBIK Load Pack, the Ateme Benchmarks team is able to address these use-cases. Coupled with an Infrastructure as Code stack, we gain in flexibility for deploying/running and quickly destroying our load-testing environment.
Johan Lescot, Performance Team Manager , ATEME

Streaming performance testing partnership

The ability to scale up the ULP solution is definitely a driver for selecting and maintaining our choice to use this solution. Moreover it is not limited to a specific hardware and we can choose the best hardware device for running our campaigns.
Johan Lescot, Performance Team Manager, ATEME

After a few months of iterations between UBIK experts and Ateme innovation team, the UBIK Load Pack streaming solution featured support for Low Latency HLS in July’21. UBIK Load Pack load testing experts and the Ateme teams continue to share best practices and needs of the OTT sector through workshops.

UBIK brings the low-latency feature in a very efficient way. Also, working with UBIK engineering team helps us to bring new functionalities thanks to the great reactivity & availability of their team.
Johan Lescot, Performance Team Manager, ATEME

Contexts of use of UBIK Load Pack streaming performance testing solution

2 Ateme teams use the UBIK Load Pack streaming solution to test streaming services reaching up to 25 000 virtual users and built on Smooth, Dash and HLS protocols.

The first team uses it on a daily basis to continuously benchmark their “on-the-market OTT products.” The UBIK Load Pack streaming solution helps the team to identify performance regressions on each commit and allows them to fix those problems quickly.

The second team uses UBIK Load Pack streaming solution to check the quality and test the best options for the performance of new products and innovative features.

Thanks to the ULP solution, we’ve been able to increase our result analysis into the response time percentiles area by filtering on the various chunk types and manifest.
Johan Lescot, Performance Team Manager, ATEME