Adaptive bitrate streaming: HLS, HDS, PseudoStreaming

Adaptive bitrate streaming is a family of technologies for transmitting multimedia content over HTTP protocol, which has a number of advantages compared to the classic content transmission in the form of files.

The main advantage is that the software that implements the adaptive streaming protocols independently analyzes the resources available to the user (CPU power and load, network bandwidth) and decides what variant of content detail at the moment it is reasonable to request and play.

As a result of this approach, the user is able to start playing the content as quickly as possible regardless of the resources available to him.

Adaptive streaming protocol standards require fairly complex content preparation, such as:

  • encoding the content with varying degrees of granularity,
  • dividing the resulting variants into interchangeable segments,
  • preparation of the list of available segments and detailing.

To date, the following implementations of the adaptive streaming ideology are known:

Using ZeroCDN.com makes it much easier to implement streaming:

  • Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS),
  • Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS),
  • Pseudo-streaming.