Consider a user watching a video on her daily subway commute. As the subway passes any area of poor network connectivity, the video player would stream her video at a low resolution. When the user’s network connectivity improves, the video player would then automatically and instantly switch to a higher quality video stream.

This is possible because a video file is typically encoded at different bitrates. When the encoded video files are packaged for streaming, metadata is generated that specifies the bitrates corresponding to each stream at every point in time of the duration of the video. The video player reads this metadata and the user’s available bandwidth, and selects the best video resolution that can be streamed smoothly.

Adaptive Streaming delivers a smooth streaming experience that avoids buffering delays. Buffering is highly undesirable, as it makes for poor user experience and more often than not makes users drop-off from watching videos. Both MPEG-DASH and HLS streaming protocols - the mostly widely used video streaming protocols on the internet - support Adaptive Streaming.

VdoCipher video player enables adaptive streaming on all devices - for streaming on browser, Android and iOS.