OTT is becoming more and more mainstream and is even used now to watch live services on TVs. In the U.S., between Sling, DirecTV Now, Hulu, YouTube and Sony Vue, there were more than 9 million OTT subscribers at the end of 2018. OTT consumers expect to have an experience similar to broadcast TV. Yet, recent events such as the 2018 FIFA World Cup demonstrated that live OTT experiences have some serious limitations, including low quality on TV sets and a delay of more than 30 seconds compared with broadcast services. If the industry does not solve those problems, they could halt the development of live OTT offerings.

This paper will analyze the current challenges involved with delivering live OTT services. One of the biggest problems facing OTT QoE is the end-to-end latency. With current HLS or DASH implementations, the end-to-end delay is between 30 and 90 seconds.

Additionally, the paper will describe solutions available today such as content-aware encoding, artificial intelligence, and low latency CMAF. Encoding and especially CAE are key to provide the best QoE for OTT services. CMAF is an essential technology to reduce the ABR delivery end-to-end latency to a level close to what broadcast offers, and CDN caching and client acceleration are other important factors that can improve QoE for video streaming.
The paper will also present new concepts that can be deployed as part of an end-to-end OTT solution to further optimize quality of experience for OTT services on existing infrastructure (i.e., headend, CDN, and clients). To improve the use of network resources and avoid unfair client behavior, operators can deploy a network optimization technology. Employing the next-generation technologies discussed in this paper, ABR delivery can reach the same QoE as a broadcast delivery network on a managed network. The paper will examine why on an unmanaged network this would be more of a challenge, as a lot of parameters are out of the control of the OTT service provider.