What is Adaptive Bitrate Streaming?

What is adaptivebitrate streaming and how does it work?

And they want videos to be streamedwithout interruption in the highest resolution possible.

Consumers want to watch online videoanywhere, anytime on any device.

That’s easier said than done!

Video looks great when streamed at the highest resolution but....

.... when bandwidth conditions worsen, like when going from wi-fi to 3G, the demands of high resolution video can overload a viewer’s connection.

This results in buffering and other delays that negatively affect a consumer’s quality of experience (QoE)

To address this problem, content delivery networks (CDNs) and video providers are turning to Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) Streaming.

Adaptive Bitrate Streaming detects a user's available bandwidth in real time and calibrates the video stream accordingly to always deliver the best possible picture quality.

ABR dynamically shifts

bandwidth to higher and lower

levels based on availability

While the concept is generally the same, there are severaldifferent flavors of Adaptive Bitrate Streaming technology.

HTTP Dynamic Streaming Smooth Streaming HTTP Live Streaming

For ABR to work, a video is first encoded at different bitrates to accommodate varying bandwidth connections.

Each bitrate version is sliced up into!tinyfragments — typically 2 to 10 seconds.

The video player then pulls fragmentsfrom the different encodings and insertsthem into the stream as bandwidthdictates.

However, it also results in a major measurement challenge

This results in faster video start timesand a continuous, uninterruptedvideo experience....

...which makes for happier viewersand content providers

Not long ago, an entire movie couldbe measured as a single file.

Now, with ABR, measuring that same movie in aggregate over a large viewing audience can require analyzing tens of thousands of separate files.

Then consider the sheer volume of ABR files coursing over a network with 150 channels

The number of fragment files over this network could be in the tens of millions for a single bitrate.

Add several more bitrates into the equation and the number ofAdaptive Bitrate Streaming files could jump into the hundreds of millions!

Skytide Insight for Content DeliveryNetworks separates the signalfrom the noise by identifying,re-aggregating and reportingon the actual contentassets.

This level of fragmentation turns themeasurement data into a lot of unusable noise.

Skytide Insight for CDNs can handle the volume andcomplexity that adaptive bitrate streaming demandsand transform it into meaningful reports in minutes.

For more information, visit www.skytide.com

Or read these other Skytide reports

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