Simulive streaming – or pseudo-live streaming as we call it – means that pre-recorded videos are scheduled to be broadcasted as live streams. Viewers experience a regular live stream. They have no way of telling the difference. A pseudo-live stream, like any other live stream, is delivered through the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol.
The only difference between a simulive stream and a regular live stream is that you don’t have to send a broadcast to Clevercast. Your viewers have no way of knowing this. But by not having to broadcast, you avoid quality loss due to encoder problems and all kinds of internet connection or bandwidth issues. It also makes your life a lot easier: all you have to do is upload the video file and set the start time of your live stream.
Pseudo-live streaming guarantees HD video streaming and an optimal viewer experience. When the pre-recorded video is uploaded, Clevercast encodes it into multiple resolutions for adaptive streaming. Since this is done in advance (instead of in real time) Clevercast can use two-pass encoding, which results in live streams with a higher quality and a lower bitrate.
Because two-pass encoding is used, your data traffic costs will be much lower! Due to the higher degree of video compression, your viewers consume less data traffic while watching the stream. Data traffic usage can be up to 70 percent lower, depending on your video content (static content or computer generated graphics lend themselves to a high degree of compression).
Pseudo-live streaming makes it easy to produce complex events, like multiple sessions that need to start simultaneously or many different languages with audio translation and closed captions.
