DVR Features in Live streaming: or does your live stream have instant replay?

Video playback on the web allows users to skip forward or rewind. This lets people quickly find the piece of the video they are looking to view, or to move backward and rewatch critical sections of the video. The idea of jumping ahead or rewinding is generalised under the term 'seeking'.

The api.video player offers 2 ways to seek. The most commonly used approach is to click ahead or backwards on the video timeline to seek over large sections of the video. Additionally, we offer buttons below the timeline bar to seek back 10 seconds or ahead 20s:

Live seek: Video instant replay

If you have ever watched an api.video Livestream, you may have noticed that the same buttons appear in a livestream. This is not an accident - you can seek backwards during a livestream!!

Imagine you're watching a talk, and you want to hear the speaker repeat a point. With many videos, you might just have to put an asterisk in your notes, and then watch the recorded video when it is posted online. Even with api.video's recording feature making the video available almost immediately after the presentation, this can take a lot of effort to re-hear the point you missed.

With the DVR feature in our livestreams, you can simply press the 10s backwards button in our player (maybe a couple of times, depending on how far backwards you'd like to go), and you can re-hear the critical information you want right away without having to wait for the recording.

You can rewind as often as you'd like. If there is a quiet portion in the presentation, you can then "skip ahead" to watch closer to live.

See it in action with this video:

The DVR feature allows up to 5 minutes of total "rewind" of a livestreaming video - allowing your users to very carefully pick through the information being presented in your videos without missing a thing.

In our post Do you want to stream a snowman? I (and my kids) used the instant replay function of my live stream to rewatch the snowman fall over as the temperatures warmed up.

Conclusion

Do you thing that rewinding your live stream would be a function that your customers use? Try it out with our livestream. Create your own livestream, and then watch your stream and play with the rewind/fast forward buttons!