A primer on Adaptive Bitrate Streaming and why it is so difficult to measure.

1. What is adaptive
bitrate streaming
and how does it
work?

2. Consumers want to watch online video And they want videos to be streamed
anywhere, anytime on any device. without interruption in the highest
resolution possible.
That’s easier said than done!

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

4. .... 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)

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

6. 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

7. While the concept is generally the same, there are several
different flavors of Adaptive Bitrate Streaming technology.
HTTP Dynamic Streaming Smooth Streaming HTTP Live Streaming

8. For ABR to work, a video is first encoded at The video player then pulls fragments
different bitrates to accommodate varying from the different encodings and inserts
bandwidth connections. them into the stream as bandwidth
dictates.
Each bitrate version is sliced up into!tiny
fragments — typically 2 to 10 seconds.

9. This results in faster video start times
and a continuous, uninterrupted
video experience....
...which makes for happier viewers
and content providers
However, it also results in a
major measurement challenge

10. Not long ago, an entire movie could
be measured as a single file.

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

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

13. 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 of
Adaptive Bitrate Streaming files could jump into the hundreds of millions!

14. This level of fragmentation turns the
measurement data into a lot of unusable noise.
Skytide Insight for Content Delivery
Networks separates the signal
from the noise by identifying,
re-aggregating and reporting
on the actual content
assets.
Skytide Insight for CDNs can handle the volume and
complexity that adaptive bitrate streaming demands
and transform it into meaningful reports in minutes.

15. For more information, visit www.skytide.com
Or read these other Skytide reports
Download now Download now