Toptal

Video streaming is an integral part of the modern internet experience. It’s everywhere: on mobile phones, desktop computers, TVs, and even wearables. It needs to work flawlessly on every device and network type, be it on slow mobile connections, WiFi, behind firewalls, etc. Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) was created exactly with these challenges in mind.

Almost all modern devices come endowed with modern hardware that’s fast enough to play video, so network speed and reliability emerge as the biggest problem. Why is that? Up until a few years ago, the canonical way of storing and publishing video were UDP-based protocols like RTP. This proved problematic in many ways, to list just a few:

You need a server (daemon) service to stream content. Most firewalls are configured to allow only standard ports and network traffic types,such as http, email, etc. If your audience is global, you need a copy of

To read the full article click on the 'post' link at the top.