Real-Time Use Cases

This page describes a subset of the use cases supported by Phenix. These include:

• Broadcast

• Multi-Angle

• Groups

• Auctions

• Watch Party

• Celebrity Connect

Many leverage Phenix's patented SyncWatch™ technology, which ensures delivery of media synchronized to within 100 milliseconds to all members of an audience, on all devices, regardless of device type, location, or connection. Usage models such as Broadcast, Multi-Angle, or Watch Party can be used as bases for enhanced experiences such as Micro-Wagering.

Broadcast involves one or more presenters, all with the same content, viewed by a large number of subscribers. Using Phenix for delivery ensures less than 500 milliseconds of latency and that all users are synchronized to within 100 milliseconds.

For the most basic broadcast case, all users are presented with the same content.

For especially critical events, the broadcast model can be enhanced with High Availability (HA). HA allows content providers to send data into multiple redundant data centers over redundant networking connections to mitigate risks of origin and first mile failures, providing a deployment with complete end-to-end redundancy. This is described in detail in our article on HA.

The broadcast user experience is much like a conventional viewing experience, with the one content stream showing on the user's device. Additional functionality, such as chat or purchasing, can be added to the experience by application developers as desired.

Multi-Angle allows delivery of multiple synchronized streams to audiences. Viewers have access to multiple angles for both live streams and replay.

In this use case, multiple different content streams are available to users.

The experience can be user-driven, where the user selects which angles to view, or professionally-produced, where the production team defines the experience for all viewers.

The user-driven experience is typically set up with a different channel for each angle, and the user can selectively subscribe to the angles they find interesting.

Groups of users can share their audio and/or video streams in real time. In this case, each user's content is available to every other user.

Typically, the user's own stream is in a smaller video window than the streams of other users. For example, Person 1 might see the image on the left, while Person 2 would see the image on the right.

Auction houses can share real-time streams of the auctioneer, the item being auctioned, and competing bidders to create a complete bidding experience. Low-latency, synchronized video streaming levels the playing field by enabling remote bidders to bid at the same time as those on-site, expanding the participant pool. Feedback from the auction participants can be via user video and audio or via data, when the user interacts with the auction application's UI to send a bid.

Although the diagram below shows only one view of the item up for bid, multiple views could be provided as for the Multi-Angle experience.

Watch Party, sometimes referred to as Virtual Couch, allows friends to hang out while watching the same live or pre-recorded content, which can include a synchronized, secure data stream, allowing for innovative experiences such as real-time micro-wagering. It’s like web conferencing, but integrated with a variety of media-rich experiences such as Watch+Bet, Interactive Prediction Contests, and Fantasy Drafts.

The setup for Watch Party is basically a union of the broadcast use case (on the right in the diagram below) and the groups use case (on the left in the diagram below).

Celebrity Connect takes fan participation to a new level by enabling a live, interactive conversation between fans and a moderator or host. The conversation can be focused around primary content such as a sporting event, or run as an interactive press conference where the moderator pulls fans “on stage” to chat with the celebrity in real-time. The resulting conversation is shared with the entire audience alongside game content to provide a fully interactive real-time experience in a one-to-many fashion.

The UI presented to users will vary depending on the user's role (e.g., the Celebrity would have a UI to control which participant to chat with). The streams viewed by the users would likely be the same.