Streaming Media Foundations

This chapter provides an overview of the key concepts and terminology used in the streaming media industry, which will help you to understand concepts and terminology used in other articles in our documentation.

It is recommended as a guide for readers with little or no experience in this industry, whether they are developers or not, as well as for those who come from other media industries such as broadcast.

The guide is, by design, a simplified overview that concentrates on the current state of the industry and tries to be as accurate as possible, rather than to give a historical perspective on it. It aims at helping you understand the context into which broadpeak.io products play a role in media workflows, and (hopefully) help you make decisions on how to use them. However, it is also deliberately written to be agnostic and not specific to broadpeak.io.

First we describe the overall context of where our solution sits in Ecosystem. Next, we look at some of the essential terminology and concepts used in online streaming in Essential Concepts. In Adaptive Streaming, we look at the modern techniques of delivery of digital streaming on the internet, which are critical to enable the type of applications that broadpeak.io powers. The relevance of those formats is further highlighted when looking (briefly) at how digital Video Advertising works. Finally, we look a little more into the technical details of the HLS Format and the DASH Format, a necessary step to understand how broadpeak.io performs its manipulation of the content.