Streaming Learning Center Where Streaming Professionals Learn to Excel
Related Articles
When your service spends a fortune on sports rights, the pressure on your technology team to deliver a flawless viewing experience is immense. It’s not just low latency; it’s synchronization across a range of playback devices driven by second-screen experiences and crisp, hiccup-free ad delivery. When it comes to delivering this type of experience, Amazon Prime Video has emerged as a leader. At the heart of this success is a lesser-known technology called Sye.
Contents
What is Sye?
Sye, developed by Swedish company Net Insight, is a proprietary low-latency streaming technology designed to solve two critical challenges in live streaming:
- Reducing latency to bring online streams in line with or ahead of broadcast standards.
- Ensuring synchronization across devices for seamless, frame-accurate playback.
Unlike traditional HTTP-based streaming protocols, Sye takes a server-driven approach to achieve these goals. While originally aimed at live sports and interactive events, Sye struggled to achieve widespread adoption.
From Struggle to Success: Sye’s Journey to Amazon
By 2019, Sye had only generated $2 million in revenue despite Net Insight investing $22.9 million into the technology. The key barriers were:
- High operational costs due to reliance on server-side intelligence.
- Limited appeal for broad adoption outside premium use cases.
In January 2020, Amazon acquired Sye for $33.5 million. By integrating Sye into its AWS infrastructure, Amazon eliminated the operational challenges that had held Sye back, unlocking its full potential for Prime Video’s live events.
How Sye Works
Sye’s architecture is built for synchronization and efficiency, setting it apart from traditional HTTP-based streaming protocols like LL-HLS or LL-DASH. Its design includes two core layers: streaming services and control services, working together to deliver synchronized, low-latency playback.
The diagram below provides an overview of Sye’s architecture and how its components deliver synchronized playback.
Sye offers features like:
- Low Latency: Delivers latency often under 10 seconds.
- Frame-Accurate Synchronization: Ensures playback across most devices—TVs, phones, tablets—is perfectly synchronized. Excludes computers watching via browsers.
- Server-Side Ad Insertion: Dynamically stitches targeted ads into live streams without interrupting playback.
- Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR): Tracks client bandwidth in real-time to deliver the highest possible video quality with fewer disruptions.
- Optimized Protocol: Handles packet loss, jitter, and long round-trip delays, reducing dependency on edge nodes.
The architecture supports seamless scalability and reliability, making it ideal for large-scale live events and interactive viewing experiences.
According to Net Insight’s pre-sale technology description, “Sye maintains more than 40% higher video quality compared to file-based solutions. In comparison, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) introduces more than three times overhead and more than four times the return traffic, suffering especially in handheld environments and overstraining the last mile with superfluous data.”
If you’re not impressed with 10 seconds of latency, note that Phenix reported latencies as high as 86.75 seconds for Super Bowl 2024, with drift, or the range of lag for viewers on the same platform, as high as 134 seconds.
Challenges of Scaling Sye
Sye’s primary drawback was its reliance on a high-CPU server component, which made it expensive and challenging to scale. Unlike HLS and DASH, where all switching logic is handled by the player and the server’s role is primarily storage, Sye requires the server to actively manage operations—similar to the approach used during the days of Flash Media Server. This architecture means that significant CPU resources are needed, and since each intelligent server can only handle a limited number of clients, scaling requires spinning up many additional servers.
Of course, when the technology is owned by a company with the world’s largest cloud computing footprint, these negatives tend to become less weighty.
How Amazon Transformed Sye
Amazon’s global AWS infrastructure was the missing puzzle piece for Sye. Key advantages include:
- Seamless scalability: AWS removed the operational bottlenecks caused by Sye’s server-side architecture.
- Monetization opportunities: Sye’s server-side ad insertion capabilities integrated well into Amazon’s ecosystem, improving the monetization of live sports.
- Enhanced user experience: Sye’s synchronization across devices aligned perfectly with Prime Video’s goals for live sports and other marquee events.
Conclusion
Sye may never have achieved commercial success as an independent technology, but its integration into Amazon Prime Video turned it into a transformative tool. By leveraging AWS’s resources, Amazon has delivered impressive performance regarding low-latency live streaming, synchronized playback, and monetization. Sye’s legacy demonstrates how innovative technologies, when paired with the right platform, can reshape industries and create exceptional viewing experiences.
And now, as Paul Harvey might say (and boy, am I dating myself), now you know the rest of the story. Good day!
