ABR Streaming

Adaptive is a new keyword in WPO (Web performance optimization) blogs and articles. Adaptive image, adaptive video and adaptive streaming and more. The idea is to know the clients (browser, device, media player) difference (CPU, bandwidth, screen size, resolution, RTT etc) and serve different contents adaptive over HTTP. Instead of RTP (Realtime transport protocol), HTTP is CDN friendly solution because of more operational of Http servers on the edge.

ABR (Adaptive Bit Rate) video stream is to detect user's bandwidth and CPU in real time and adjust the quality of a video streaming accordingly. In 2006 Move Networks created this idea. They built a product which trans-rated videos into multiple versions of the same asset, encoded at different bit-rates. Further their product divided each video in many small chunks or “streamlets” each a few seconds long. They built a player which downloaded a video as a series of HTTP GET requests for sequential streamlets. The player continuously measured the available bandwidth so that the next GET request issued would be for a version of the streamlet best matched to measured available bit rate.

The chunked concept was very successful though Move Networks business was not. Apple, Microsoft and Adobe all implemented this ABR. Netflix (Video streaming) is using ABR too.

Apple HLS (Http Live Streaming), it works by breaking the whole stream into a sequence of small Http-based file downloads. As the stream is played, the client will select from a number of different bit-rate streams based on client CPU and bandwidth. M3U8 playlist is the first request, and it contains the metadata for various sub-streams.

Microsoft HSS (Http Smooth Streaming), it is a IIS media services extension to enable adaptive streaming of media to Silverlight and other clients over Http. HSS uses the simple concept of delivering small content fragments (typically 2 seconds video) and verifying that each has arrived within appropriate time and playback at the expected quality level. Based on the result, do adaptive delivery for next fragment. Manifest file is the first request which describes the fragment metadata to the client.

From above 2 implementations of ABR, we can see ABR solution needs client (player), Http streaming server and transcoder (to break whole content into small chunks in different bit rate) and also a manifest files for ABR metadata. Adaptive content serving or getting in real time provides good performance and user experience. We should be able to use similar idea in other WPO initiatives.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming
http://www.contentdeliverynews.com/?page_id=93