We’re launching a great new feature for Streamio – ABR and live transcoding! In short, you can live stream with higher quality while each user gets the quality that suits their equipment and bandwidth.
This problem is an old one – you want to stream at high quality, but when you crank up the quality it works poorly or not at all for some viewers. This is often due to circumstances beyond our control, for example that these viewers are using simpler devices, shaky wifi or mobile connections. Keep in mind that broadband deployment varies significantly between countries, and not everyone may have the same stable connection we are used to.
ABR and transcoding is the solution
ABR stands for adaptive bitrate, a video player feature that automatically selects the correct quality for each individual viewer based on their circumstances. The Streamio player does this very quickly, and each viewer gets an optimized stream, which can also be changed manually if desired.
Transcoding means the producer does not have to think about anything other than providing a compatible stream. Our system takes the incoming stream and transcodes it, in real-time, to the appropriate outgoing formats. At the time of writing (subject to change during testing), Streamio receives a 1080p stream at either 25, 30, 50 or 60 frames/second and transcodes it into three different streams at 1080p, 720p and 480p resolutions. Rackfish also offers custom transcoding services 24/7 and transcoding from various sources to custom destinations.
