Encoding.com announced today that it now supports HTTP Streaming for both the iPhone and the iPad.
For years, different companies have offered publishers and developers the ability to serve content at variable bit rates. That means that when you’re watching a video on your phone or on Hulu, the quality of the video stream adapts to your Internet connection. If you have a solid connection, you can view very high quality video in real-time. However, if your connection isn’t as a strong, you can still watch the stream without interruptions — the quality will just be lower.
Live video publishers often use adaptive streaming, but it can be useful for pre-recorded material as well. It also saves content providers money because it only pushes out what your connection can handle. Last June, Apple announced that it was going to bring adaptive streaming to the iPhone 3.0 and to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. What makes Apple’s approach more unique, however, is that it can stream adaptive content over an HTTP server. Not only can video be streamed off of standard Apache web servers (far cheaper to do), but it also lacks the issues with proxies or firewalls that the UDP-based systems like RTP and RTSP face.
Apple’s Developer Library has posted this diagram that shows how HTTP Live Streaming works.
What Encoding.com Does
HTTP Streaming gives publishers more options regarding content delivery. AT&T has a history of rejecting applications that serve video that doesn’t include a lower bitrate option. While you can use a Mac or PC to encode your video files in formats suitable for HTTP streaming and then upload the files and the playlist file to your CDN or web server, this is inefficient if you deal with a large volume of video.
As we’ve discussed before, Encoding.com is a company that offers a SaaS-based encoding service for publishers and content creators. You upload your video file to Encoding.com and tell them what format you want it encoded in. They use their cloud-based server grid to do the processing and transfer it either to your CDN of choice or to your web server. You can then tell your website or your iPhone app where to grab the video in a user-friendly format.
Encoding.com has long supported standard .h264 video for the iPhone but now it can do HTTP Live Streaming as well. Furthermore, you can also opt to do HTTP Streaming for the iPad, which means that the data served will be in the right aspect ratio and adjusted to the right video size for the device.
HTTP Streaming is a good option for publishers or developers that are thinking about adding video into applications, but don’t want either full video files built-in (which takes up space) or to risk rejection from the App Store because they don’t have the option to downgrade their video stream.
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Tags: encoding.com, http live streaming, ipad, iphone
