US Patent 10433023 Heuristics for streaming live content

Techniques for delivering live streaming content are described by which a streaming heuristic is selected based on the delay between the live and client playheads. For live content for which the delay is short, a low latency streaming heuristic is selected which is designed to handle live content streams for which only a few seconds of content can be buffered. For live content for which the delay is longer, a higher latency streaming heuristic is selected which is designed to handle streams for which the delay is sufficient to build a buffer of content fragments.