How bitrate Affects Streaming Services

If you have ever watched any video, tv show, movie, or streamed a video game on the internet, and at times the video ends up looking blocky? Well, that's due to your internet and how much bitrate it can download. Bitrate is how much information the video sends out per second to your device from the internet. Let's say your internet download speed is 10Mbps, and the movie you're watching is sending you 15Mbps constantly. You will experience a very choppy movie, and it will often buffer, which means you'll have to wait until your device downloads more data to continue playing. With improvements to encoders (The tool that creates your video from downloaded information), we can move away from this constant flow of downloaded data for streaming and use what they call VBR, which stands for Variable Bitrate. This technology changes how much data the movie you're watching is sending based on your internet. Let's revisit the example from before, your internet download speed is 10Mbps, and the movie you're watching is sending you 15Mbps. Instead of the movie sending you 15Mbps constantly, which will make the movie choppy and stop to buffer, it will change its output to 9-10 Mbps. Doing this lowers the quality(your movie looks blocky) of the movie, but it won't be choppy, and you won't see it buffer. Making for a better experience, and nearly all streaming service you use has this VBR bitrate. If Netflix knows your internet can download more data, it will all up the bitrate producing a much higher quality like 4k. Hopefully, now you know why your movie or tv show is choppy, low quality, buffers, or even looks great!

Check out this video comparing a high bit rate and a low bit rate.