Apple announced that a new HTTP based adaptive bitrate streaming product will soon be available on the iPhone 3.0 and desktops. Adaptive bitrate streaming, was first made popular by Move Networks.  Microsoft took the concept and worked it into the SmoothStream technology, part of IIS7.  Adobe, with it’s release of FMS 3.5 supports dynamic bit rate streaming.

Since there isn’t really a stop shop to deal with various end user bandwidths and computing power, concepts like adaptive bit rate, smooth streaming and dynamic streaming are very attractive to content produces.   The idea is simple, detect watcher’s bandwidth and CPU capabilities in real time and then adjust the quality of a video stream. This requires encoding a single video at multiple bitrates and switching to the most appropriate one on a moment-by-moment basis. The result: very little buffering, fast start time and a good experience for both high-end and low-end connections.

Adobe does have its own “dynamic streaming” for Flash Media Servers, but that requires buying Flash Media Servers and switching between streams within a single real-time session.   HTTP delivery treats video files like any other file and transfers them in chunks through individual sessions. Since no special servers are required, HTTP streaming is seen as less expensive than traditional streaming, though it should be considered less secure.  Since the delivery is essentially, HTTP, you shouldn’t have too much problems finding support for this technology on most CDNs.

After video publishers have encoded their content in multiple versions for adaptive bitrate streaming, they’ll feed the files to Apple’s Segmenter, a new piece of Mac desktop software that cuts video into small chunks. “It’s like a ginsu knife,” Bishop said.

Then, when a video is playing, Apple will check periodically to see which bitrate chunk it should serve to the viewer.  Chunking players like Move, Swarmcast and Microsoft are a bit more diligent about this than Apple. They check every 2 seconds to see how fast the last 2 seconds were received and pump out the next chunk accordingly. Apple won’t be quite so optimized.

Right now there is only 2 companies making live encoders.  Inlet and Envivio and these encoders are quite expensive.  You could pay less for a Honda Accord than one of these encoders.  But I suspect the prices will drop as more and more manufacturers are hitting the market.  I would also look for Sorensen or On2 to make a software encoder.

I still don't expect this format to win any battles against Adobe or Microsoft for market dominance.  You still are stuck using the QuickTime player to play back the video.   QuickTime is not nearly as flexible or customizable as Flash or SilverLight