SLDP

Latency matters

Low latency has always been a hot topic for live streaming industry. Many use cases require sub-second delay between image capture and its display.

• Chatting: talking to someone means immediate media delivery.
• Gaming viewers expect to see all events real-time.
• Betting and bidding have big money at stake so you don’t want to see anything behind the time.
• Security and surveillance demand real-time picture to do an immediate response.
• Second screen means you don’t want to see your favorite event dozens of seconds behind TV or other devices.

With the decline of Flash and RTMP in 2020 as the main way to view live streams, the industry has been looking for new ways to deliver the media close to real-time.

Softvelum introduces SLDP – a last-mile delivery protocol for end-user devices to cover all that.

What is SLDP

SLDP is a streaming protocol based on WebSockets. Basic features are:

• Nearly one second delay between origin and player. Hence the “Low Delay” in the name.
• Codec-agnostic. Play whatever your end-user platform has: H.264, H.265/HEVC, AV1, VP8, VP9, video, AAC, MP3, Opus audio.
• ABR real-time support. Switching channels takes just a GOP time and each channel may use its own codec.
• Simultaneous synchronized playback among multiple browsers and mobile devices.
• CEA-608/708 closed captions are supported with HTML5 Player SDK.
• Buffer offset support for decreasing zap time (start latency).
• Latency tolerance support to handle network glitches.
• Audio-only Opus streaming on iOS to void audio transcoding from WebRTC

Take a look at our latest case study
LiveX and VVCR: Nimble Streamer Powers Cloud Production Innovator
featuring SLDP used by the leading production company.

SLDP clients support

SLDP is supported on various platforms with our playback solutions.

SLDP can be played in HTML5 browsers with MSE and MMS support using the SLDP HTML5 Player, and you can also add playback to your own players using the JavaScript SDK. This also includes DVR support by using HLS DVR streams. Mobile platforms also have native SLDP playback with Larix Player for Android and iOS.