Glossary
Ad Decision Service
A service that determines how to fill an advertising placement opportunity.
Ad Decision Splicer
A service that dynamically inserts advertisements into media, typically in conjunction with an Ad Decision Service.
Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming
A technique for delivering media to a client by providing a set of identical content renditions at varying qualities and allowing the client to select the most appropriate version based on bandwidth and decoder performance.
Apple HTTP Live Streaming (Apple HLS)
Released by Apple as an adaptive bitrate protocol primarily for iOS distribution, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) has become the standard for transmitting material to client devices. Because it implements the MPEG Transport Stream container, the elementary stream packetization for audio, video, captions, and ad signaling is well understood and supported by many consuming applications. The primary challenge for HLS contribution is the delay it introduces. HLS segments are approximately 10 seconds in size and, because Apple recommends a buffer of three, it’s common to experience video decoder buffers of 30 seconds or more.
Adobe Real-Time Messaging Protocol (Adobe RTMP)
Originally developed as a proprietary protocol by Macromedia, the Adobe Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) has been widely used over the past decade for progressive video delivery. In recent years, the popularity for RTMP has subsided for client distribution due to the proliferation of HTTP-based adaptive bitrate protocols. However, for media contribution, it’s widely used due to its ubiquitous presence within open source and commercial live encoding applications. Though praised for wide adoption and relatively low latency, RTMP is not without challenges. Specifically, proprietary and often ad-hoc implementations of caption and ad insertion data from in the ecosystem can create challenges.
AWS Global Accelerator
As a method to improve the global availability and performance of your application,
the AWS Global Accelerator
codec
A portmanteau of the words COder and DECoder, a codec is a standard algorithm for digital media encoding. Examples include: H.264, HEVC, AV1, and MPEG-2.
container
Also known as a format or package, a container is a standard for associating audio, video, and metadata into a file system structure. This can be as a single file or as a collection of multiple files, depending on the container type. Examples include: MP4, MPEG-2 TS, QuickTime (MOV), or WMV.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A distributed network of servers that delivers web content to end users.
content provider
A creator of media content that wants to reach an audience.
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Services and functionality that enable content owners to determine who and how their content is accessed.
encoder
A service that converts digital video from one format to another, typically to facilitate distribution.
Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP)
Developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is a network protocol designed for delivery of audio and video over IP. Its basis on UDP (low latency), flexibility, and wide application for media workloads make RTP an ideal ingest protocol. We strongly recommend using Forward Error Correction in conjunction with RTP to account for network packet loss. Column and row depth configurations will be network dependent.
origin
A service hosting content.
packager
A service that reformats, multiplexes, or repackages media without re-encoding.
Quality Control (QC)
A process for ensuring that the output content is of sufficient quality.
