Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING AUGUST 2018 36 iGAMING BLUE PAGES iGAMING IN DEPTH THE LATENCY CHALLENGE IN GAMING Delivering content at low latency is key for a great online gaming experience, yet it remains one of the biggest challenges faced by online gaming operators the world over. Online casinos have the added requirement of low latency to speed up gameplay in order to facilitate more dealing rounds and, thus, increase revenue for the operator. This requires latency that is much lower than most live streaming delivery today. While this challenge may be mitigated by Adobe Flash, streaming on mobile devices and major web browsers is either not supported adequately or is being phased out. As a result, some operators have turned to HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) – a HTTP-based media streaming communications protocol – to overcome this challenge. However, HLS still causes high latencies and is thus not a viable option for gaming operators, resulting in a fundamental disconnect between technologies and use cases in the industry. On average, players experience a delay of approximately 40 seconds to over a minute. This greatly disrupts players’ game experience and even results in a loss of revenue for the gaming operator. Therefore, gaming operators need a streaming solution that is able to deliver predictable and consistent low latencies to players in order for them to see the action in near real-time on virtually any device and from anywhere in the world. How then can operators overcome this daunting challenge? Essential to the online gaming experience today is the delivery of content at ultra- low latency so players can experience the game in near real-time on any device. OVERCOMING LATENCY WITH WEBRTC Speed remains at the core of the gaming experience. For an industry which requires as close to zero latency as possible, a different approach needs to be taken as HLS is challenging for latency of less than one second. A new solution to this pervasive issue is Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) technology, an open framework that enables scalable, real-time delivery of on-demand content for web browsers and mobile applications. WebRTC offers much lower latency as it runs over User Datagram Protocol (UDP) – a protocol which eliminates the need to create discrete media segments, delivering consistently low latency to all players. WebRTC is ideal for applications in