How live football broadcasts are achieved
As a self-confessed soccer obsessive, I need to be able to access live streams of the best games wherever I am. Sometimes it’s not always possible to find a place that shows the particular game I want to watch, but thanks to technological advances I can now watch almost any game I want through a live football broadcast.
With the help of the internet and some networking facilities, I can watch football live through my computer at the office and my laptop if I am stuck in a hotel room somewhere. Being able to watch any of a number of football matches that air on a particular day is all well and good, but this article tries to explain how it’s done for the more curious natures.
To understand how live soccer broadcasts work, you first need to understand a bit about networking. In its simplest form, networking is a computer exchanging data with another computer. To be really simple, there isn’t much difference between this and sending a letter.
The first computer directs a piece of information to another computer and then sends it over the cable that connects the computers together. The second computer checks the addresses of all incoming messages and reads only the messages addressed to it.
Live football streaming is accomplished with the help of streaming media. This concept is not as strange as it sounds and it just acts like a normal television or radio broadcast that broadcasts live football matches. When you want to watch a certain football stream live, a program called a “streaming media server” splits the desired file into parts called “packets.”
These packages run across the Internet one at a time and are reassembled on your computer in the same way. As long as you have a fast internet connection and the server is not overloaded, the live football streams will start playing instantly on your PC and the file size is generally small.
Unfortunately, like most good things, there is a downside to using football broadcasts to get your dose of live action. Since it is live and must be delivered just in time over the potentially unpredictable Internet network, quality is sacrificed to improve speed and performance. Although the primary use for streaming video is web distribution, this type is not suitable for local presentations.
To watch live football streams, your computer requires a special program, called a streaming media plugin. These add-on programs are generally free and can be downloaded from the Internet.
The difference between downloading videos from the Internet and watching a live football broadcast is that the user does not need to wait for the entire media file to download before being able to watch it. While the quality may not be perfect, a live soccer stream seems to start playing almost instantly.