By Piotr Kreglicki

Let’s start with some numbers. In 2016 more than 54% of all video starts occurred on mobile devices. That’s up from 46% in 2015, 34% in 2014, and just 17% in 2013. This one metric has been a constant: the growth of mobile video consumption.

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.