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Football fans know that delays in broadcast channels can have a huge impact on the viewing pleasure. Because latencies determine who sees the ball in the goal first: If a neighbor celebrates first, this can be very annoying, especially during penalty shootouts. So we measured how long it takes for the ball to land in the goal on the screen with classic DVB reception and IPTV streaming. There has been a lot here.
Because the fastest reception path has always been the satellite signal, we have always chosen DVB-S2 as the virtual zero point for our latency measurements against which all other transmission paths should be measured. But technical changes and some tricks at Vodafone have changed things: At least for the European Football Championships, cable TV on ARD and ZDF is ahead of the satellite signal.
On ARD it was 1.5 seconds, on ZDF also 2.5 seconds. The games of the German football team as well as the semi-finals and the European Championship final are broadcast by ARD and ZDF on FreeTV. All European Championship games, including the five specific games, can also be seen on Magenta TV.
Fiber optic instead of satellite
As a cable network operator, Vodafone managed to speed things up by making a decisive change: The TV signals from the stadium will now be sent via fast fibre optic lines directly to the two TV centres in Kerpen and Frankfurt-Rödelheim. Until now, they were initially transmitted via satellite from the OB van in the stadium and this signal was processed by the TV providers in the broadcasting stations. This gave satellite reception a new start.
In addition to the fiber optic connection, signal processing plays a particularly important role. Here, Vodafone is also using a trick called “Cheer Booster” for the EM term, in which the company uses the uncompressed TV signal for signal processing. The cable network operator saves the pre-encoding step and encodes the studio signal directly in low-delay mode at the final stage.
Cheer Booster currently only works on Das Erste HD and ZDF HD and so far in 13 federal states. According to Vodafone, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse and Baden-Württemberg, the signals of ARD and ZDF are currently on par with the satellite – since C’T is based in Hanover, we have not yet been able to check this ourselves. “We are still working on introducing Cheer Booster in the three federal states,” explains Guido Neuper. Small latencies only apply to Vodafone’s cable TV network; PYUR & Co. customers still lag behind the satellite signal.
Updates
14 June 2024,
2:18 PM
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According to Vodafone, the European Championship games on Vodafone’s cable TV network on ARD and ZDF will now also be shown with low latency in the three federal states mentioned above, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse and Baden-Württemberg.
Waipu has improved
The improvements compared to our first measurements are also available on Waipu.tv. In early June, we experienced a delay of one and a half minutes when we used the Waipu TV app in a browser on a PC. According to Waipu, there was an error in the app, and we actually measured a much more bearable latency of 13 (ARD) and 15 seconds (ZDF) compared to the fastest cable signal we have ever seen.
However, when it comes to streaming, our recommendation still applies to using the media library apps from ARD and ZDF to receive TV over the Internet. These are the closest to classic DVB reception channels. Compared to front-mounted cable TV reception, this was an average of five seconds. In the table you will find an update of our measurement results.
(UK)
