Videos use a lot of space, and bandwidth.
With so many users each day, even at the same time; lots of money and thought has been put into video hosting and streaming services.

Hetereogeneity - End-systems also have different capabilities - ie some devices have lots of bandwidth, some have none. It is a challenge to cater for all the different requirements.

Reducing Sizes

  • Coding - use redundancy within and between images to decrease the number of bits used to encode an image
    • Spatial - within an image - ie blue for this whole row
    • Temporal - between images - ie this row is still blue

Bit Rates

CBR - Constant Bit Rate - Encoding rate is fixed

VBR - Variable Bit Rate - Encoding rate changes depending on the amount of spatial and temporal coding

DASH

Dynamic, Adaptive Streaming over HTTP.

Videos are divided into multiple chunks, and each chunk is encoded at different bit rates. A manifest file provides the URLs for the different chunks and their different bit rates.

The client periodically measures the server-to-client bandwidth, and requests the next chunk at the best bitrate.