Imagine you’re in the middle of an important virtual event, a highly anticipated product launch, or a crucial training session, and suddenly, your live stream starts to buffer. The screen freezes, the audio cuts out, and your audience grows increasingly frustrated. From tech giants to small and medium-sized enterprises, many have encountered this issue for various reasons. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how to prevent live streams from slowing down to ensure a seamless and uninterrupted viewing experience.
As a professional representing your enterprise, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted streaming experience is paramount, as a single buffering event can ruin the entire video experience. This can lead to a drop in viewer numbers and lead to poor audience retention.
It’s incredibly frustrating for everyone involved when live stream buffering interrupts their experience. As reported in research for State of the Online Video, video rebuffering is the most frustrating aspect of watching videos online according to 44% of people and 64% are more likely to watch live events online if the stream is not delayed from the broadcast. That’s why it's crucial to stop live stream buffering before it causes any significant problems that could harm your business in the long run.
This blog provides a detailed guideline by first understanding what causes live stream delay and then discussing in detail how to prevent live stream from slowing down by addressing the key factors involved. Let’s dive into it.
What Happens When a Live Stream Slows Down
When a live stream slows down, you might notice the video pausing and a loading icon appearing on the screen. This is called buffering and to visualize it, think of YouTube: the gray line represents the video data that has been loaded, while the red line shows the current playback. When the red line catches up to the gray line, the video has to pause to load more data, causing the dreaded buffering.
As for live streams, they depend on real-time data transmission and if the connection can’t keep up, the stream pauses to catch up, resulting in, once again, buffering.
Why it Matters
A stable and high-quality live stream is crucial for retaining audience engagement and maintaining a positive viewer experience. An unstable live stream can have major consequences. It affects the viewer’s experience and causes most viewers to lose interest and leave.
Consider a live stream of a critical product launch event where the company unveils a groundbreaking new product. If the stream experiences interruptions during this pivotal moment, viewers might miss essential details and demonstrations, damaging the initial impression of the new product and hurting the company’s image.
It is especially important for businesses that rely on live streaming for marketing, training, or communication purposes, as poor streaming experience can result in lost opportunities, diminished customer satisfaction, and a negative impact on brand image. Hence, learning how to prevent live stream from slowing down will ensure a smooth streaming experience.
Why Does a Live Stream Slow Down?
A live stream can experience slowdowns or buffering for several reasons:
Your Viewer’s Internet is Not Stable Enough
One of the most common causes of live stream slowdowns is a weak and unstable internet connection on your viewer’s end. Live streaming requires a lot of data to be transferred in real-time, so if your viewer’s internet connection isn’t reliable enough, the stream will struggle to keep up, leading to buffering and interruptions.
Bitrate and Bandwidth Do Not Match
Bitrate is the amount of data transmitted per second in a video stream, while bandwidth refers to the maximum capacity of your internet connection or the maximum data transfer rate of a network.
Bitrate and bandwidth are closely linked, meaning that a higher bitrate means more data is being sent every second and to accommodate this, a higher bandwidth would be required. If the bitrate exceeds your bandwidth, the livestream will suffer from buffering and lags.
Large Video Files Can Slow Down Your Stream
Large video files can lead to significant buffering issues for viewers. During live streaming, data is continuously uploaded in real time. Using an inefficient encoder that struggles with large files can result in large video chunks/segments, leading to longer processing times and increased buffering.
Skipping CDNs Can Affect Your Stream
Let’s say you are broadcasting from the USA to viewers in Australia. When an Australian user requests the stream, they are connecting to your distant server in the USA. This causes greater live stream delay, slower load times, and more buffering. However, by using a CDN, the user requests the stream from a nearby server in Australia. This minimizes buffering and ensures a smooth streaming experience.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers placed in different geographical regions that work together to deliver content closer to the viewer’s location. When users try to access any content, the CDN helps them serve the file from the server closest to their location rather than getting it from its original server, thereby reducing the distance for the data to travel. This helps users access files faster, reduces load on servers, and distributes content globally.
Busy Traffic Can Mess with Your Stream
Network congestion occurs when too many devices are using the same network simultaneously, leading to slower internet speeds for everyone. With a sudden influx of a large number of viewers in a live stream, slower data transfer rates, reduced internet speeds and increased latency are expected. Buffering and interruptions become inevitable, making smooth playback challenging.
Streaming Platform That is Not Reliable
If your live stream keeps buffering, it is often due to your streaming platform that won’t keep up. To ensure a smooth live streaming experience, the platform you use must be both powerful and resourceful. It should support high-quality video and audio and offer multi-format support for compatibility and high-quality streaming protocols.
It is essential to choose a platform that has eCDN support for faster and efficient content distribution, robust analytics for sorting out live stream performance issues, and support for advanced streaming protocols. These features ensure no live stream delay and most importantly, an amazing viewer experience.
Some Devices Might Struggle with Your Stream
Different devices have varying processing capabilities and support different operating systems, leading to differences in how they handle video playback. Some devices have better mobile network capabilities, while others might struggle with weaker network connections, resulting in more buffering.
However, most compatibility issues can be addressed through technologies like encoding, transcoding, and Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR), which we will discuss shortly.
How to Prevent Live Stream from Slowing Down
If you’re wondering how to stop buffering on live streaming, you’re not alone. To enjoy a seamless live streaming experience and stop live stream buffering, it’s crucial to implement strategies that address it. Here’s how you can maintain optimal performance throughout:
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Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR) Technology
Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR) helps to stop live stream buffering by automatically lowering the video quality when the internet speed drops and raising it when the internet speed has improved. Think of it as a very flexible system which ensures that the viewers get the best possible video quality without any interruptions.
Reduced quality is less likely to make users lose interest and quit watching a video when compared to buffering. One academic research has proved this: Through 800 10-minute tests comprising 1449 views, initial delay in loading and video stalling resulted in users quitting watching the video. If the viewers’ quality of experience matters to you, then ABR is the solution to your buffering issues.
Leverage Global CDNs and eCDNs
Currently, 48% of the top 1 million websites worldwide use a CDN to ensure seamless content delivery to their users. Businesses rely on CDN providers because the cost of deploying individual servers worldwide is expensive, whereas CDN is cost-effective. To stop live stream buffering to a greater extent, a CDN dedicated solely to enterprise networks, known as an eCDN, is the way to go.
An Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN) is like a special version of a CDN just for businesses. While a CDN handles public internet traffic, an eCDN manages internal company traffic. It routes video content through a private network to reduce network congestion and ensure smooth streaming in places like corporate offices. eCDN is perfect for enterprises that need fast, reliable, and secure content delivery across networks.
CDNs or eCDNs also help in reducing latency. Latency is the delay between when something happens in real life and when you see it on your screen. It’s the time lag that can cause the live stream to feel slightly behind real-time events. With the help of CDNs, the data trip becomes much shorter, and any live stream delay or lags are minimized, providing a smooth, consistent, buffer-free experience.
Moreover, when many users globally request content from a single server, it can struggle with the load. CDNs also solve this by using multiple servers to handle streaming, ensuring smooth delivery to hundreds of viewers. This setup creates a high-availability environment where congestion and server failures don’t disrupt viewers’ experience.
Keep Track of Performance Issues with Analytics
Monitoring the Quality of Experience (QoE) and live stream analytics during and after the video is important to prevent viewers from abandoning the video in between and to ensure that the credibility and image of the organization is maintained and uplifted by providing a better quality of experience. Certain QoE analytics help in identifying player buffering %, the average time it took for the player to load, the number of times the player failed to load, devices where the player buffered, and more.
These analytics help in providing valuable insights in improving your video strategy and using certain technologies like eCDN, ABR or a powerful platform that is capable enough to reduce latency and buffering as low as possible.
Use High-Quality Encoding
Video encoding involves transforming raw or binary video data into a digital format that can be played on any browser or device. This process compresses the video, reducing its size from gigabytes to megabytes while maintaining the video quality experience. It solves compatibility issues by ensuring that the video file is compatible with every browser and device.
This reduces bandwidth usage and helps avoid buffering, as video compression leads to smaller size, less storage, and low transmission bandwidth.
Transcode your Live Stream
Transcoding, like encoding, may seem like a complex process, but you can consider it as part of the conversion process. Transcoding basically helps in creating multiple renditions of the same video. Consider a 1080p video; it would be transcoded to make 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, and 720p versions and each of these renditions would exist independently of the original 1080p file.
For organizations that live stream videos, it’s important to give their viewers the choice to watch the stream at a resolution that their internet can handle. Transcoding helps solve bandwidth challenges, otherwise all they will get is delays and buffering. Transcoding not only provides resolution options but it also gives format options so that viewers can watch videos on any device. Once the file has been transcoded, it loads even large files a lot faster as it is now compressed and optimized for live streaming.
Use the Right Live Streaming Protocol
Video streaming protocols are standard methods that break a video into smaller chunks, send the data over the internet, and then play the video in the correct order. Each video streaming protocol has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, some protocols have high latency while others have low latency. Some can support Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming, while others cannot. Hence, it is essential to consider what kind of protocol is supported by devices when selecting a video streaming. Here are some options:
- RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol): A universally accepted protocol designed for the purpose of maintaining low latency and stable performance. However, it has low scalability, and it is not optimized for quality.
- RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol): A lesser-known protocol famous for streaming from IP cameras and surveillance systems. It has extremely low latency, but it is not commonly suitable or compatible with many devices.
- HLS (HTTP Live Streaming): The most widely popular video streaming protocol as it is compatible with most devices and HTML5 players. It is also the most secure and scalable protocol out there. It supports ABR so it optimizes the stream automatically according to network conditions. Even though it relatively has a higher latency, the new low-latency HLS has solved this problem as well.
- WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication): One of the latest protocols with the fastest audio and video streaming capabilities. This protocol is specifically designed for video conferencing but lacks scalability.
Choosing the appropriate live streaming protocol is critical for reducing latency and buffering, providing an uninterrupted viewing experience for your audience.
Live Stream Using a Scalable Live Streaming Platform
A powerful and scalable enterprise-grade live streaming platform can solve all your buffering issues and live stream delays. They have a robust infrastructure to support high traffic and deliver smooth streams.
Advanced platforms offer global CDNs and eCDNs support, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon CloudFront, etc. These solutions also optimize your live stream resolution to match your internet speed using ABR technology. They also encode and transcode your live streams to help resolve compatibility and buffering issues.
Real-time insights are essential to understanding your live stream performance and viewer engagement. Modern enterprise-grade solutions ensure a consistently high quality of experience, keeping viewers satisfied and engaged throughout the live stream with the help of real-time analytics.
Say Goodbye to Slow Live Streams with a Scalable Live Streaming Platform
VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube, a Gartner-recognized enterprise video and live stream platform, enables businesses around the world to stream the highest quality live videos privately and securely for a widespread audience.
This powerful and scalable enterprise video platform allows your viewers to enjoy a smooth live stream experience – thanks to adaptive bitrate streaming technology. The platform utilizes the latest video encoding, transcoding, and processing technologies to address compatibility and compression issues. By leveraging enterprise content delivery networks (eCDNs), VIDIZMO ensures smooth streaming to large audiences through internal video caching. Additionally, using HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) eliminates bandwidth concerns and provides excellent scalability for your live streams.
It is designed as a one-stop live streaming platform for organizations to stream to viewers all over the world regardless of their internet connection or device. If your live stream keeps buffering and you're looking for solutions on how to prevent live stream from slowing down, check out and try EnterpriseTube for free for 7 days!
People Also Ask
What is live streaming?
Live streaming is broadcasting video and audio content over the internet in real-time, allowing viewers to watch events as they happen.
What is live stream buffering?
Buffering is a live stream delay that occurs when the video player pauses to load more data, causing interruptions in the smooth playback of the stream.
Why does live stream slow down?
Live streams can slow down due to slow internet speeds, high viewer traffic, large file sizes, device compatibility issues or server limitations, leading to buffering and interruptions. Not using a scalable live streaming platform with the latest technologies can also lead to live stream delay.
What is a live streaming platform?
A live streaming platform is an online software that enables users to broadcast video and audio content in real-time to an audience over the internet.
Some live streaming platforms also offer many features to interact with the live audience, providing a secure, private, and scalable service.
How to stop buffering on live streaming and improve the overall viewer experience?
To stop live stream buffering, use a scalable live streaming platform, ensure a stable and high-speed internet connection, utilize adaptive bitrate streaming, employ content delivery networks (CDNs), and regularly monitor performance with real-time analytics.
