TikiLIVE is excited to announce that our updated TikiLIVE player now offers support for adaptive bit rate streaming. If you’re new to the world of online streaming you may not understand the benefits of this additional functionality. In this short article, we’ll go into detail about adaptive bit rate streaming and how it can improve the viewing experience of users accessing your content.
What is Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming?
Adaptive bit rate streaming is a technique where video content is streamed across computer networks or more commonly, the Internet. In the past, streaming companies used protocols such as RTSP and RTP. Today’s most popular streaming methods are based on the HTTP protocol and meant to work well across large HTTP networks like the Internet.
How Does Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming Work?
This new type of streaming works by actually detecting a user’s CPU capacity and bandwidth to alter the quality of the video stream on the fly. Adaptive bit rate streaming requires an encoder that can encode a video at varying bit rates. The player then switches between the different encoding based on a user’s available resources. This technique then results in little buffering, quick start and a positive streaming experience for both fast and slow Internet connections.
To offer more detail, adaptive bit rate streaming works by using a method of HTTP video streaming where the video is encoded at different bit rates, then each of the varying streams are broken into smaller video segments. The streaming player is aware of the different bit rates and stream segments through what is called a manifest file.
As a video first begins to play, the client will request the lowest offered stream. If the video player determines that the streaming speed is faster than the bit rate of the segment that has been downloaded it will make a request for the next highest bit rate segment. Subsequently, if the client determines that the download speed has deteriorated it will request a lower bit rate segment.
Benefits of Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming
- Best Possible User Experience – Using adaptive bit rate streaming allows users to have the best possible viewing experience regardless of connection speed. This offers content creators the ability to focus on building quality content as opposed to the complications of video streaming.
- Scalable – Content delivery networks like TikiLIVE utilize adaptive bit rate streaming to better deliver streaming content to users. By receiving the original video stream from our origin server we then replicate it to our additional server around the world. This then allows the content to be served to end users from the “closest” server based on location.
- Less Resource Intensive – Adaptive bit rate streaming is less resource intensive for both the player as well as the content delivery network that is delivering the content.
- Live Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming – While we’ve offered VOD adaptive bit rate streaming in previous versions of our media player, it wasn’t until recently that we’ve offered live adaptive bit rate streaming. This allows our users to get the same benefits of adaptive bit rate streaming that they’re used to with recorded content on live content as well.
Interested in Learning More About TikiLIVE’s Updated Player?
You can demo TikiLIVE’s adaptive bit rate streaming feature here. If you would like to learn more about new features of our new TikiLIVE player, in addition to adaptive bit rate streaming, feel free to contact our team today at 305-289-4557.
