On Esports AV: IHSE USA

AVT Question: Please share trends and insights into esports’ dynamic and quickly evolving landscape.

Thought Leader: Dan Holland, Marketing Manager at IHSE USA

The biggest challenges for setting up a competitive esports tournament are simultaneously maintaining the player’s bandwidth and frame rates while reducing the amount of interactive latency from the player’s keyboard and mouse. A delay of even 1ms by the player could mean an instant loss in the game. Many professional gamers are playing at 120fps or even 240fps, which requires splitting the signals to feed the streaming channel without disturbing the frame rates on the players’ computers.

When it comes to producing an esports event, the technical team must be prepared to capture real-time action in non-broadcast resolutions and frame rates without disturbing or burdening the player’s CPU or graphics GPU with additional software processing. Producers of esports must be able to switch between real-world, non-broadcast resolutions and frame rates without disturbing fast-action coverage that is streamed live to services like Twitch or YouTube.

For those venues demanding support for higher refresh rates for the players, while simultaneously streaming real-time action at 60Hz, a KVM display management system like IHSE’s Draco Ultra offers a higher level of performance, combining esports and broadcast frame rate conversion. Unique to these extenders is the ability to define and scale a specific frame rate such as scaling 240Hz to 60Hz. This provides a greater advantage for reduced latency for the players while simultaneously providing remote viewers the same experience they would see at home in an uncompressed version.

For many in the industry, the latest JPEG-XS standard represents a new level of ultra-fast transmission and sub-millisecond latency, perfect for esports applications. The codec delivers high-quality compression and can be transported over SMPTE ST-2110 networks. With IHSE’s new JPEG-XS for KVM systems, both traditional broadcasting streams at 60fps can run parallel in the same display management system, allowing production streams and player streams to co-exist with the higher resolutions and higher frame rates demanded by real-time gaming competition.