# What's the lowest delay you can realistically get for HLS playback on iOS

**URL:** <https://community.wowza.com/t/whats-the-lowest-delay-you-can-realistically-get-for-hls-playback-on-ios/39053>\
**Category:** Wowza Streaming Engine\
**Created:** [July 18, 2012, 2:50pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/whats-the-lowest-delay-you-can-realistically-get-for-hls-playback-on-ios/39053 "2012-07-18T14:50:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![J\_R](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/779978/32.png) [@J\_R](https://community.wowza.com/u/J_R)\
**Post date:** [July 18, 2012, 2:50pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/whats-the-lowest-delay-you-can-realistically-get-for-hls-playback-on-ios/39053/1 "2012-07-18T14:50:25Z")

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It seems like the standard delay for HTTP Live Streaming is 10-30 seconds. What would I need to do to get that under 5 seconds? What’s the lowest I can go reliably and still provide decent picture+audio quality?

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**Author:** ![Richard\_Lanham](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c68b51/32.png) [@Richard\_Lanham](https://community.wowza.com/u/Richard_Lanham)\
**Post date:** [July 19, 2012, 12:14am UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/whats-the-lowest-delay-you-can-realistically-get-for-hls-playback-on-ios/39053/2 "2012-07-19T00:14:29Z")

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Take a look at this article

[https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-apple-hls-packetization-cupertinostreaming](https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-apple-hls-packetization-cupertinostreaming)

Richard

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**Author:** ![Richard\_Lanham](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c68b51/32.png) [@Richard\_Lanham](https://community.wowza.com/u/Richard_Lanham)\
**Post date:** [July 19, 2012, 12:43am UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/whats-the-lowest-delay-you-can-realistically-get-for-hls-playback-on-ios/39053/3 "2012-07-19T00:43:09Z")

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Maybe. You have to work with key frame frequency. Try 2 second key frame frequency and cupertinoChunkDurationTarget “2000” (2 seconds)

Richard

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**Author:** ![J\_R](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/779978/32.png) [@J\_R](https://community.wowza.com/u/J_R)\
**Post date:** [July 18, 2012, 4:29pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/whats-the-lowest-delay-you-can-realistically-get-for-hls-playback-on-ios/39053/4 "2012-07-18T16:29:45Z")

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> Take a look at this article
> 
> [Configure Apple HLS packets for HTTP streaming](https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-apple-hls-packetization-cupertinostreaming)
> 
> Richard

Thanks, Richard. I actually did read that article but didn’t see any definitive answers from it on low of a delay you can get. Is it possible to achieve a less than 5 second delay with HLS and using liverepeaters to accomodate 100,000 viewers?

In an ideal world I’d much rather have a delay of 2 to 3 seconds, is that achievable?