A new era of live streaming

Television habits have changed thanks to people opting to watch video content on their smartphones. Because of this, there has been an increase in potential use cases of 5G. Bell Media decided to start looking for an immersive in-game experience that would give the audience full control of what they watch inside their TSN and RDS sports apps.

Bell Media is focused on creating content and building brands to create entertainment, inform, and engage with the audience across all supported devices. The company is always looking to innovate and provide its users with the best experience while using its apps.

For the realization of this idea they had in mind, they reached NexPlayer, the company in charge of making premium video players for OTT apps and with which they were already working previously for the video streaming service in their applications on different platforms. NexPlayer brought a revolutionary feature called MultiView that caught their attention. This feature allows simultaneous and synchronized live streaming events to display on the same screen with full interactivity.

A unique end-to-end solution built with AWS backend support.

NexPlayer and Amazon Web Services have been working together over the last decade to optimize end-to-end technology. This time, the obstacle for both is to be able to combine different video streams on the same device. This feature involves next-level technology that ensures the highest quality, quick time to market, and a premium level of support to secure the best service. Throughout the development process, NexPlayer was in direct contact with the AWS Solutions Architects and service teams with the goal of achieving positive results.

The main challenge was to unify the user experience for it to work on Android, iOS and HTML5 devices with an optimized video quality according to the device’s capability and creating a seamless user experience. MultiView provides the highest quality across many different device types and diverse network conditions enabling the syncing of different streams to the same playback positioning.

Some key aspects of the MultiView feature are Widevine DRM content protection, which provides a secure and reliable stream service as well as NexPlayer’s in-house built ABR technology that adapts the compression and the video quality to match the bandwidth signal.