How Streaming Services Work

How Does Streaming Work?

Like other types of data, video/audio content is also shared over the internet. First, video and audio are broken into data packets and sent over the internet. When the client device gets this data, it will interpret them as a video or audio file. 

Sending video over the internet requires a faster method of transporting data than TCP/IP so for video streaming UDP/IP is used to transmit the data.

TCP/IP is quite reliable. But in video streaming, speed is more important than reliability. TCP/IP work on sending data in order but UDP/IP doesn't care about the order, it just sends the data. In this case, many of the packets are lost but in video streaming, video flow is much more important than some pixels of data for few frames. UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol and it is used with the internet protocol (IP). That's why it is known as UDP/IP. 

Many of the internet connections use Transmission Control Protocol because of its reliability. But in terms of video, streaming speed is more important. Users will not notice if some pixel of a frame is lost. 

Buffering and Slow internet Speed

Video devices hold some of the video data already for the smooth play of the video which is called buffering. The buffer data for a given video helps when users lose the internet speed. Many things depend on a slower internet connection. At the user end, we can expect the slow speed of the connections like WIFI. At the server end, location matters for the internet speed. For example, if servers are located in Asia, then accessing the video data from America will be slower than accessing the site within Asia.

Increase Streaming Speed

Nowadays CDN tools can be used to increase the streaming speed because CDN servers are located in many locations. So clients don't need to access the data from thousands of miles away. Many of the streaming services use CDN for faster delivery of streaming data. Netflix is one of them to use CDN service.

We are an OTT app development company with vast experience in developing high-quality video streaming applications for popular OTT platforms like Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, and Android Smart TV. Our development team specializes in using advanced tools and technologies build feature-rich OTT applications to facilitate frictionless media streaming across devices. We use agile methodologies to accelerate the development process and reduce time-to-market. Our end-to-end video streaming app development services ensure that your OTT app delivers seamless streaming experiences across multiple devices for maximum user engagement.