Giraffic's Distributed Adaptive Streaming

Giraffic's Distributed Adaptive Streaming is an add-on to the standard variable bit-rate formats such as Adobe HDS or RTMP, Microsoft SmoothStreaming and Apple HLS, which immediately enables higher video quality and smoother bitrate transitions on the end-users' existing Internet connection.

Adding Giraffic to the existing video player on top of these codecs has demonstrated:

• End users gain higher resolution (bit-rate) on their existing Internet connection. Benchmarks show that users on Adobe HDS with Giraffic are getting in average almost double the quality (bit-rate) on their same exact Internet connection.
• Viewing the highest quality/bitrate supported by the end–user's won Internet connection, even if the backbone or the rest of the network is congested. So only the end-users' actual available bandwidth will impact his streaming quality, and not any other back-end or middle-mile Internet congestion. Superior buffer management and smoother bit-rate switching - ZERO re-buffering pauses and faster period to sustain the highest quality possible.
• Substantially lower bandwidth costs - even though higher bit-rates are being delivered to end user (meaning: more data pushed), the bandwidth costs decrease due to Giraffic's fully-distributed streaming model and its comprehensive buffer management that guarantees no excess data is pushed.

Giraffic HTTP Dynamic Streaming Benchmark:

1) The testing environment:

• 1.5 Mbps wireless connection.
• An Adobe HDS encoded video containing 8 different bit-rates (from 250kbps to 3000kbps) with a source coming from a leading CDN.
• Video length: 4:38 minutes.

2) Test Scenario:
Play the video without Giraffic plugin, and afterwards turn on the Giraffic plugin.

3) Test results:
With HTTP only (Giraffic off), playback resulted in 15 re-buffering pauses.
With Giraffic turned on, we got 0 re-buffering pauses.

The network behavior was also recorded during the test. In the graph below you can clearly see that with Giraffic:

1. Streaming is more stable (less fluctuations, smoother bitrate switching).
2. Approximately double the bitrate (video quality) is reached in the same Internet connection.
3. The total download time with Giraffic was significantly lower and so is the number of seconds taken to reach the highest quality supported by the Internet connection.

Higher Bitrate Viewed, Smoother and shorter bitrate switching