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Understanding how your video bandwidth is consumed

Understanding how your bandwidth is consumed is important.

On a face value, many of our non-technical users believe that if you upload a 500 mb video, then the video largely remains 500 mb and watching that video completely up to 100 times would mean 50,000 mb (50 gb) of bandwidth used.

But this couldn't be farther than the truth.

When you upload a video, your video undergoes a lot of processes commonly referred to as encoding and packaging.

During this processing, here's what we do:

- We lossless-ly compress your video, if you uploaded a 500mb 1080p video, our encoding engine will most likely compress it to 80 - 250mb at same 1080p resolution without loosing any quality while saving you lots of data.

- Take the video and produce  240p resolution to X resolution up to 4K. 

So if you uploaded a single 500mb video of 1080p, we'll produce 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p version of same video. If you video has max resolution of 480p, we only produce 240p, 360p and 480p version.

We encode videos up to 4K quality.

- Chunk it into small segments allowing the video to leverage adaptive streaming in real time.

- Repackage it from raw mp4/avi/mov format to a better web-based streaming protocol such HLS or MPEG-DASH making easier for viewers to stream your video.



After this, your video is ready for streaming.

This entire process could take few seconds to many minutes depending on the size of the video.

Now when a viewer requests your videos, we serve them adaptive files... if the viewers internet is fast, they get 1080p, 2k, 4K segments, if their internet speed drops, they get lower resolution segments such as 360p, 480p.



This allows users to stream your content buffer-free and you save a lot of bandwidth as we only count the exact amount of data streamed to each viewer.



Viewer A may consume 85mb

Viewer B may consume 172mb

Viewer C may consume 92mb



And all viewers watched 100% of same video but streaming different segment mixtures.



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Updated on: 04/04/2023

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