YouTube TV looks to lessen live latency with broadcast delay feature | Digital Trends

Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends If you’ve ever streamed live TV — particularly a sporting event — while also following the same event on social media, you’ll have likely noticed that latency is a thing. That is, that what you’re watching is behind what folks are talking about online. Latency has always been the nemesis of the internet. It causes web pages to load slower. Games to freeze up. And video to lag behind. But a new feature slipped into YouTube TV (and as noted by the YouTube TV folks on Reddit) aims to give you a little control over things. Specifically, it’s meant to help reduce that broadcast delay. Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends Basically, it works like this: That dreaded broadcast delay is built in by default, allowing the video stream to build up — or buffer — before it’s shown to you on the screen so that you’re fed a continuous stream without pausing or skipping. The trade-off is that you’re just a little further away from “live.” Now, there’s a toggle that allows you to make the buffer smaller, which in turn lessens the amount of time between true “live” and what’s shown on your screen.
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