The MPEG-DASH Superguide

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DASH’s Time Has Come 

By now, you’ve probably read enough to understand what DASH is and why it’s important. But let’s boil it down to the most important points: DASH is an adaptive bitrate streaming technology for delivering multimedia—i.e., video. It’s a codec-agnostic technology designed to partition and deliver congruent pieces of a multimedia file to a client, using HTTP. Along with network conditions and other variables, the receiving device (such as a smartphone, tablet, set-top box, smart TV, or computer) dictates which “chunks”—each of which contains a different resolution and bitrate—to deliver to ensure uninterrupted play of the file as a whole. Of course, adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming has been around for a while. If you ever watched a cat playing a piano and it got fuzzy for a few seconds, you experienced a version of ABR. But was it DASH doing the heavy lifting? Almost certainly not. That’s changing...