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Comment by jtsiskin | Hacker News Reader

I don’t consider 500ms “low latency”. You should be below 250ms before you start touting it as a key selling point.

Live streaming video usually has a latency of 6 to 30 seconds, so in that context anything below a second is very low latency

Edit: the topic of my bachelor's thesis included low latency live streaming, so I hope I have at least some knowledge :)

this application is for real-time communication more so than live streaming.

You are extremely lucky if you get a contemporary online livestream under 10 seconds, this includes AFAIK all of YouTube, and the vast majority of HLS-based streams - which are often 30 seconds latency or worse.

Getting buffers down to 500ms is already pretty insane assuming reliability doesn't suffer. 250ms is well within the envelope of a single drop on a 3G network killing playback

There are plenty of twitch streams that have latency under 2 seconds in low latency mode. You have to watch the source stream and the streamer can't use larger buffers, but it has already been done for well over a year or more. If a streamer has the chat window on screen you can type something in and see it on stream in two seconds. I have seen private mixer streams have 2 second latency also.

According to many sources, sub-second is considered to be ultra low latency. 500ms is good for now but 250ms would be great.

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