Deep Learning Could Be The Future Of Online Streaming

Video streaming has been popular for quite some time, but its growth seems to keep expanding. While it was initially popularized by platforms such as YouTube and then Facebook, today they are being joined by video-on-demand services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Recently a study suggested that as much as 70% of all online traffic consists of streaming video and audio, and it is placing a heavy demand on internet bandwidths across the world. Although internet speeds and bandwidth have grown over the years, the demand for videos with higher resolutions and bitrates has grown as well. To help optimize the usage of available bandwidth for streaming video, most streaming platforms use algorithms known as Adaptive Bitrate (ABR). Traditional ABR algorithms are either rate-based that vary the video quality based on connection speed, or buffer-based that attempt to constantly keep a certain percentage of the video pre-loaded as a buffer so that the stream is smooth.