Adaptive Bitrate Streaming – An Overview

In an age of rapidly increasing mobile computing, tablet use, and internet video streaming, adapting to user preferences relative to their current device and providing a great user experience on that device has become a chief objective within the technology community.  With the sharp increase in mobile use, wireless connectivity has been steadily improving, whether for mobile (LTE) or wireless internet (wifi and some other interesting protocols).  However, the problem with wireless connections and mobile usage, as many users know is that they are inconsistent.  With an inconsistent connection, a streamlined user experience becomes more difficult to attain.

The answer to this problem is adaptive bitrate streaming.  The basic premise is that the video is encoded at several different rates, and adjusts in real time to the quality of the user’s connection to change the quality or resolution of the stream, depending on the bandwidth available to the user at a given time.  The burden of this technological advance comes down on the encoders – it is a much more complex technology than previous fixed-rate streaming protocols.  However, the results for user experience make the technology much more desirable – so much so that there are several different adaptive protocols on the market, from Apple and Microsoft and other businesses that create proprietary solutions for their own products , as well as a new industry-standard protocol called MPEG_DASH (for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). 

Whether a universal standard is eventually adopted or not, adaptive bitrate streaming is an exciting and still-evolving topic of conversation that affects consumers and technology companies alike.  The task here for encoder manufacturers like Telairity here is not to dictate the standards that will be used by the industry to dynamically adapt video to fluctuations in bandwidth, but rather to support the standards that emerge for this purpose as quickly and efficiently as possible.