There is no media company that isn’t having to deal with multiscreen delivery. There is an explosion in the amount of content being distributed OTT and the number of formats media companies need to deal with to make that happen. Service providers are concerned about QoS and QoE, and they need data and analytics that will help them respond rapidly and improve performance. Everyone needs to better understand what is happening in the delivery chain and how it impacts the viewer experience. Smart media companies are now creating efficiencies in the packaging and delivery of assets and also monitoring and responding to the performance of their delivery network.
It’s often said that change is disruptive, and that’s certainly true for the most significant media distribution development in recent memory, which is the advent of new viewing devices for content delivery. With the extension of video viewing from standard TVs to smart phones, tablets, connected TVs, DVRs, and game consoles, today’s media landscape is radically different from just a few years ago.
What used to be all but impossible—the delivery of consistently acceptable image and sound quality despite often uncertain and fluctuating bandwidth— is now taken for granted by viewers on these devices. Adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming is a key technology in making this work.
Telestream’s VP of Enterprise Product Management, Paul Turner, is back for a investigation into the most used bit rate encoding methods. They can get a bit tricky!
CBR, VBR and ABR – what do they mean?
Within the media industry, we often hear discussion of the bit rate of a file. There are several ways to encode (and therefore describe) the bit rate of a file, the most common being CBR, VBR and ABR. Their meaning and uses are quite different, though. In this post we’ll cover what each of the acronyms actually means, where that type of encoding is most advantageous, and what the relative disadvantages of each type of encoding are.