How slow is media stream: A survey of latency difference between media stream and text stream

Media data, including voice, pictures and videos, can offer a better sensory experience and more vivid information to users than text data. Supposing you are watching NBA finals on the spot and one of your friends is also watching that match through the internet. Then a beautiful dunk lit up the atmosphere of the whole court and you send this information to your friend. Did he see the dunk when he received the message? Probably not! That is the latency difference between real-time video and text data causing by transmission. Although the existing works measured the delay of different video live stream in various network environments and many works are devoted to the reducing the latency of video transmission. The transmission latency difference between video stream and text stream is still significant. In this paper, we conduct the first in-depth measurement of latency difference between real-time video stream and text stream on NBA games. We use the screenshot to record the time-board of both video data and text data at each sampling time. Then, the character recognition tool is used to write these data into excel file for evaluation. Finally, the latency difference is evaluated among different live source. Experiment results show that, the transmission latency difference between video stream and text stream is still significant which leads to the understanding that the transmission delay of streaming media needs to be further improved.