Delivering Exceptional Esports Live Streaming Experiences: How Tencent Cloud Media Services Leads the Industry with Innovative Solutions

Esports has experienced a meteoric rise since its debut as an exhibition event at the international gaming championships in 2018. By 2023, Esports became an official competition event at the global Esports championships, with national Esports teams achieving remarkable results and fierce competition. According to statistics, from September 25 to October 8, 2023, the 20 Esports events broadcasted at the global Esports championships reached a cumulative total of 450 million viewers across all media, with a single-day peak of 95 million viewers.

As Esports events grew in scale and popularity, the demand for high-quality streaming services also increased. Tencent Cloud Media Services Media Service recognized this need and developed advanced solutions to address the challenges faced by the industry. For both the 2023 League of Legends World Championship in Seoul and the 2024 Mid-Season Invitational in Chengdu, Tencent Cloud Media Services StreamLink was essential in ensuring the stability and quality of live streams from the competition venues to their respective production centers. By controlling cross-continental latency within 400ms, it allowed for low-latency and stable transmission.

The processed live streams were then transmitted within the same region from the studios to the partnered broadcasting platforms. Tencent Cloud Media Services's ultra-fast HD transcoding capability and a wealth of processing features ensured high image quality, ultra-low latency, and ultra-high concurrency for the vast audience. This seamless integration of cutting-edge technology and efficient streaming solutions has positioned Tencent Cloud Media Services as a leading provider in the Esports industry, catering to millions of fans worldwide with ultra-clear, real-time, and exciting game content.

Challenges and Goals

Stability: Events taking place across the globe require the original audio and video signals to be remotely transmitted to the production center, making the stability of the entire link crucial.
High-definition: After secondary production, the signals need to be processed and distributed by the cloud, ensuring a high-definition viewing experience for the audience.
Low latency: To meet the demands of live streaming, the entire transmission process needs to have low latency characteristics.

Leveraging its rich experience in live streaming various large-scale events over the years, Tencent Cloud Media Services has integrated cutting-edge encoding kernels, stable and efficient media transmission technology, powerful and intelligent video AI, and large-scale streaming media systems to build an end-to-end solution from the video source acquisition to the playback end. This solution can help enterprises quickly build a stable, reliable, high-definition, low-latency live streaming platform that supports intelligent time-shifting and online directing, ensuring the ultimate viewing experience for users.

Why Us — Esports Live Streaming End-to-End Solution

Cross-continental transmission latency within 400ms

●The ability to transmit audio and video data with low latency and stability across regions:

●Stream Services TMIO SDK:
Optimizes the quality of stream transmission from the terminal to the cloud, solving problems such as network fluctuations and insufficient bandwidth at the field collection end.

●StreamLink's multi-path transmission capability:
By transmitting simultaneously over multiple link layers, it improves the overall end-to-end transmission reliability and quality, further enhancing the upstream streaming and final playback experience. The sending end makes judgments and decisions on the status of each established connection based on real-time transmission QoS, choosing the best route for data transmission. This solves the problem of insufficient bandwidth or jitter in a single network under weak network conditions.

Multi-link transmission enhances upstream streaming stability and expands bandwidth

●Tencent Cloud Media Services StreamLink provides a solution with multiple upstream access points:
During live streaming, it can dynamically adjust routing strategies and data sending ratios based on the QoS of multiple links, and achieve seamless downstream playback; it can also adjust the sending path at the packet level, such as high-priority packets, retransmission packets, etc., using better quality routes to ensure the optimization of overall transmission quality.

Dynamic routing strategy under multiple access points

Save 50% bandwidth with high-definition, low-bitrate media processing and packaging capabilities

During the media packaging stage: based on self-developed encoding cores of different standards such as O264/V265/TXAV1/O266, Tencent Cloud Media Services Media Processing Service has achieved breakthroughs in compression performance, encoding speed, bitrate control, and subjective visual algorithms compared to widely used encoders like x264/x265/libaom in the industry. The self-developed encoders bring a 30%+ compression gain.

By combining intelligent scene recognition, dynamic encoding matching, and image quality enhancement and restoration functions, the ultra-fast high-definition intelligent perception dynamic encoding technology can save 50% bandwidth while improving subjective image quality, providing higher-definition streaming media services at lower bitrates.

During the media packaging stage for event scenarios, the solution can support multi-bitrate, multi-audio track, advertising, and continue capabilities.

●HLS/DASH/CMAF adaptive bitrate output capability:
This can meet the network conditions of different playback devices, and by using various DRM encryption schemes such as Fairplay, Widevine, and PlayReady, the security of live streaming is enhanced.
●Multi-audio track capability:
This allows audiences from different language regions to freely choose while watching the same channel. At the same time, during a brief interruption of the source stream, a static image or a pre-uploaded advertisement can be automatically filled in to optimize the viewing experience for the audience.

Millisecond-level playback experience with ultra-low latency live streaming media processing capabilities

●Tencent Cloud Media Services Stream Services' CMAF and LLHLS low-latency sliced packaging protocols:
While satisfying adaptive multi-bitrate, it can also achieve relatively low latency comparable to FLV. By using chunked encoding and chunk transmission, the latency is reduced from the HLS and DASH segment granularity to the chunk level. At the same time, low-latency CMAF and LLHLS based on HTTP can be directly distributed on almost all CDN platforms, with better standardization and universality.

Low-latency CMAF/LLHLS

●WebRTC Live Event Broadcasting (LEB)‘s ultra-low latency playback experience within 1 second：
Ultra-low latency LEB is comprehensively optimized and upgraded based on WebRTC in terms of end-to-end signaling flow, audio and video codec support, transmission modification, and media processing optimization, making it more suitable for large-scale live streaming scenarios.

Flexible and cost-effective online directing capabilities

Online directing, relying on Tencent Cloud Media Services's powerful live video capabilities, realizes live stream switching and multi-screen mixed broadcasting in the cloud.

The cloud directing platform supports custom screen layout, standby mechanism, audio and video synchronous switching, and other functions. It eliminates the need for heavy traditional directing hardware, making it easy and quick to use directing services and enriching online business scenarios.

Server-side Ad insertion capability

●Server-side ad insertion:
When it is necessary to monetize streaming content through advertising during a competition, Tencent Cloud Media Services event live streaming can provide server-side ad insertion (SSAI). Unlike client-side ad insertion (CSAI), all operations in SSAI are performed on the server side, directly splicing the ad media files into the video stream. The advantage is that it is not easy to be blocked or tampered with.

●Dynamic Ad Insertion:
Tencent Cloud Media Services's ad insertion feature identifies the insertion and end points of ads in the video stream through SCTE-35 tags, thereby achieving dynamic ad insertion.

●Personalized Content:
Each ad is dynamically returned by the ADS(ad server), which can present different ads to different users, thereby maximizing ad effectiveness and revenue.

Leading AI empowerment

●Live Time-Shifting:
The TS (Transport Stream) fragment addresses and TS files are stored separately in the cloud VOD system. By passing a time parameter through the time-shift playback domain, clients can play exciting video content from before the current time.

●Real-time Highlight Generating:
For various live sports events, Tencent Cloud Media Services Live, combined with AI, can identify exciting moments in real-time with low latency. Users can quickly time-shift to watch exciting moments based on the markers on the playback progress bar. Users can also display other advertisements based on real-time event callbacks combined with business logic.

●Intelligent Highlight Reel:
Automatically edit exciting replays from esports live streams in real-time, which can be played picture-in-picture during match intermissions using the director's console capabilities.

●Intelligent Danmaku:
Danmaku comments automatically avoid the ROI area of the game screen, providing a more refined product experience for the audience.

●Intelligent Subtitles:
Real-time speech recognition can be performed on voice information during the live broadcast, and it can be converted into subtitles. In addition, subtitles can be translated into the target language. Currently, this feature supports voice translation services in languages such as Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean.

Cases

League Of Legends World Championship

For the 2023 League of Legends World Championship in Seoul, it is crucial to transmit the live stream from the competition venue to TJ Sports for processing, ensuring the stability and quality of the entire link.

Advantages：

• Cross-Continental Low-Latency Transmission: Achieving stable and low-latency transmission from the venue to the production center within 400ms using Tencent Cloud Media Services StreamLink.
• Ultra-Fast HD Transcoding: Significantly saving bandwidth costs while maintaining the highest image quality with Tencent Cloud Media Services' transcoding capabilities.
• Comprehensive Processing Capabilities: Offering audio and video enhancement, live time-shifting, content understanding, highlight point analysis, intelligent Danmaku, video screenshots, and intelligent editing.
• Global Acceleration Nodes: Meeting the demand for ultra-low latency, ultra-high image quality, and ultra-high concurrency with Tencent Cloud Media Services' 3200+ global acceleration nodes.
• Seamless Integration: Ensuring the stability and quality of the entire link from the competition venue to the partnered broadcasting platform.

League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational

In 2024, the MSI (Mid-Season Invitational) event held in Chengdu, China. TJ Sports and Riot Games have successfully completed the global public signal broadcast production and multi-language live streaming for the event using a fully remote production method. In the entire event broadcast execution plan, a total of 150 video signals were transmitted between the three locations, with Chengdu's venue sending 89 video production signals to the two production centers. It is expected to cover tens of millions of League of Legends fans worldwide.

For this event broadcast, Tencent Cloud Media Services' StreamLink has also undertaken the transmission service from the competition venue to overseas. The processed Chinese live stream has been transmitted within the same region using media transport from the studio to the partnered broadcasting platform, bringing ultra-clear, real-time exciting game content to millions of League of Legends fans worldwide.

We provide a one-stop audio/video solution covering Encoding, Enhancement, Stream, Playback, and more.

Industry-leading technologies provide a competitive edge in entertainment, social networking, education, gaming, live streaming, and other applications.

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