Streaming live casino games over low bandwidth

According to a poll conducted by The Telegraph listing the 100 most annoying things in the world, a slow Internet connection makes the top 10, beaten only by:

1. Chavs
2. People driving close behind you
3. People who smell
4. People who eat with their mouth open
5. Rude shop assistants
6. Foreign call centres
7. Stepping in dog poo
8. People who cough and do not cover their mouths

The general consensus is that it’s more annoying than toilets you have to pay for; more annoying than knobs who jump the queue at the bar; more annoying than constipation; more annoying than iPhone obsessives; even more annoying than the recession! Give or take a few items here and there (the recession has perhaps been a little more inconvenient to some), I don’t think the list, and slow net connectivity’s place near the top of it, is too far off the mark. This is especially so when it comes playing live casino games.

If there’s a natural enemy of live dealer casino games it’s a low speed Internet connection.  Nothing is more frustrating than trying to play a game with a video stream that is lagging a few seconds behind the actual deal.  The dealer’s addressing the player seated one or two places to your right asking what their move is, while you’re being prompted by the game software to chose whether to hit or stand. The deal is still being completed on the video and you’re being prompted to place your bets for the next round! Sound familiar?

Deal lag is disconcerting and the worse your connection, the worse it gets…until of course the video disappears altogether.  Then you may as well play an RNG game.

There’s an article on this site that addresses required connection speeds for play live casino games. It was written a couple of years ago and most of the games have evolved a bit since then with a clear trend toward larger, higher definition video streams that would require even more bandwidth in the absence of improved delivery technology. Presumably video streaming technology has improved since then because these larger, higher definition live videos play well with limited/no lag over the same connection speeds I was playing back then (yep, we’re still waiting for the much vaunted National Broadband Network with its super high speeds to be rolled out here in Australia).

Given live casino providers can’t do much about players’ connections speeds, their big challenge is to provide the highest quality video stream at the lowest possible bit rate (the size of the video file per second of data streamed). A live video that looks great distributed at a bit rate of 2mbps isn’t going to be much good to punters connected at 500Kbps and limited bandwidths are still common around the world, particularly in emerging markets likes India and China ( where rumor has it casino games, particularly baccarat, are quite popular).

Today I read with interest, but not surprise that an online casino company had signed an MOU to acquire a business that develops technologies to allow video streams to be viewed at low bandwidths, with the aim of being able to offer live games playable on tablets and smart phones over 3G networks.

I’m not overly excited at the prospect of playing live casino games on a smart phone…a beautiful dealer reduced to the dimensions of 5cm x 5cm makes no sense to me. But these kinds of leaps in streaming technology, married with say a 50 inch HD plasma…do excite me!