Developers - get the player source code
Today Swarmcast proudly launched Autobahn HD for Flash®, a unique technology that combines the ubiquitous Flash® platform with network acceleration technology and adaptive bitrate streaming to ensure the best possible video quality for every viewer. In this series of postings I’m going to go through the exact steps necessary to get your high quality content delivered through Autobahn HD and things are going to get quite technical pretty quickly, but first let’s look at just what we mean when we say “adaptive bitrate streaming”.
For years Swarmcast has been providing network acceleration technologies which allow Internet users to view high quality content wherever they get an Internet connection. However, “high quality” is a moving target and bitrates are constantly growing. When encoding video content for online delivery providers have had three suboptimal options: select the least acceptable bitrate viewable by all of the target audience, pick a high bitrate knowing that only a fraction of the target audience can view it, or offer multiple bitrates and put the selection decision on an end user who may not know Kbps from kibble.
Selecting the right bitrate is made harder because the bandwidth available to end users is far from constant. It varies depending what else they’re doing with their computer, changes as a result of the actions of other computers on their network, and is even sensitive to radio interference if they’re using wireless. Picking the right initial bitrate is hard for you, the provider, or them, the user; being certain that the bitrate will be the correct one throughout playback is impossible.
Adaptive Bitrate Streaming eliminates the necessity if picking a bit rate. Your content gets encoded at multiple bitrates, and your viewers seamlessly switch from one to another during playback according to their available bandwidth. Viewers won’t see rebuffering caused by too high a bitrate, and they won’t watch grainy video when they could be watching your higher quality encodings.
Our Adaptive Bitrate Streaming is the only system that works without requiring a custom media player, file format, and media server. Everything is standard Adobe® Flash® served from any HTTP server. In the next post we’ll look at the steps necessary to make your content available for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming through Autobahn.
