Net Insight's Sye is a live OTT streaming solution, which the company says offers frame-accurate synchronization across any type of screen including linear broadcast TV. This means no delay between the primary screen and secondary screens in user multiscreen OTT TV applications.
"Have you ever seen a tweet appear about a missed field goal even as you are still watching the team line up to make the kick on your iPad? Sye from Net Insight claims ... to solve this issue allowing consumers to not have real-time televised events spoiled by social media posts," one Diamonds judge remarked.
Specifically, Sye is a virtualized software application that can be deployed over private, public or mixed clouds. It uses user datagram protocol (UDP) as the basic transport protocol and adds enhanced selective retransmission capabilities, an optimized ABR scheme for streaming, and a synchronization protocol for synchronized delivery.
Net Insight says that the more selective retransmission protocol carries lower overheads compared to TCP retransmission and higher packet recovery probability. This maintains a higher profile viewing for a longer period of time, compared to legacy HTTP streaming, before reverting to a lower resolution bitrate.
Sye does not segment the stream into small files since this increases delay. It uses the same encoders and transcoders as in current CDNs, but ingests ABR profile streams as IP MPEG streams before entering into the segmenter/packager in normal CDN origins. Egress servers distribute the content to end devices, similar to today's edge caches, but there are no cache buffers. Instead, Sye uses a small, fixed-sized buffer at the receiving device, which is also used as a retransmission buffer.