How to Reduce Buffering and Improve Streaming Quality in Your OTT App

Before exploring solutions that address buffering concerns, it is first important to examine the reasons buffering occurs. Buffering happens when the playback speed of the video exceeds the rate at which the video downstream data can be delivered, which causes the player to stop and resume while loading additional video playback content. The common reasons buffering occurs are: foundational Content Delivery Network (CDN), some of the video encoding practice used, adaptive bitrate streaming practices, server traffic during peak play periods for streaming services, and user side network congestion.

A professional ott app development company will thoroughly analyze your streaming infrastructure to discover precise bottlenecks and deploy mitigating strategies tailored to the unique challenges your platform faces.

Adaptive Bitrate Streaming is the main thrust of OTT delivery today. This technology automatically shifts the quality of a video stream based on the viewer's available bandwidth and device capability. Rather than delivering a single video quality to every viewer, ABR creates versions of your content at multiple bitrates and resolutions.

The streaming player continuously measures the state of the network and will switch quality levels in an imperceptible fashion without interrupting playback. If available bandwidth begins to decrease, the player will drop to a lower quality in order to maintain continuous playback, then scale back up again once the playback state returns to optimal conditions.

Adopting ABR requires encoding your content into multiple bitrate ladders, typically this will range from 240p at 400 kbps for test scenarios, to 4K at 25 Mbps for premium scenarios. An experienced OTT app development company can help configure optimal bitrate ladders commensurate with your content types and viewing demographics.

Enhance Video Encoding and Compression

The effectiveness with which your videos are encoded can directly affect the streaming experience. Newer codecs, such as H.265 (HEVC) and AV1, have a greater compression rate than their older H.264 counterparts, providing equivalent quality to H.264 with 40-50% lower bitrates. This reduction in data means that users are less likely to encounter buffering.

However, choosing the best compression codec is not straightforward. While newer codecs do provide a stronger compression rate, they do require more processing power, thus rendering them unusable on older devices. A professional ott app development company is skilled in this balancing act, finding the balance and codec implementation strategy that maximizes the experience across your entire user base, taking into consideration any potential compatibility issues.

Furthermore, you can also vastly improve efficiency without compromising payoff with enhanced encoding settings, like GOP structure settings, frame rate settings, and/or resolution settings.

Content Delivery Networks will be the champions of reliable streaming. They provide the means for you to have systems in place that allow the distribution of your content to servers located in various geographies, so that the user always gets the data from the location closest to them, minimizing latency and enhancing loading speeds.

Using more than one CDN provides even greater reliability. If you optimize your CDN provider to support one or two other CDN partners for redundancy, you both protect yourself from a CDN going down in a region and allow capability to route traffic based on real time performance. Thus, as an example, if one CDN is congested with traffic, it will automatically route traffic to the next via the both CDN partners.

Services offered by a premium ott app development company include CDN integration and optimization for your content delivery network infrastructure, which will seamlessly scale to support your increasing user base. They will continuously monitor the performance of the CDN while re-configuring it to maintain the best possible delivery speeds in all geographies.

Intelligent preloading techniques can almost entirely eliminate perceived buffering. Even with some caching, if your app can anticipate what content your user is most likely to watch next, you can begin preloading content in the background before the user even presses play.

Buffering size optimization is also essential. While larger buffering does have the benefit of more room for network deviation and fluctuation, it can also add extra time to the loading of the initial content and also take up more app memory. We want to select the optimum size of buffer - somewhere between 10-30 seconds of content is the sweet spot which gives strong performance in initial loading but also protects users from buffering during playback.

Progressive loading ensures the initial segments of the content load first or immediately, while buffering or caching subsequent content. A skilled ott app development company will be able to implement these types of complicated algorithms for the smoothest possible viewing experience.

Your origin servers and streaming architecture should be able to handle many simultaneous users. Load balancing directs traffic to various servers and prevents a single server from becoming overloaded during peak viewing times.

Horizontal scaling capabilities can automatically increase your infrastructure during busy periods and reduce it in slower periods, optimizing performance and cost. You can use techniques like database optimization, cache strategies, and efficient API design to help reduce server response times.

Cloud-based infrastructure solutions such as AWS and Google Cloud or Azure provide the most flexible and scalable options that modern OTT platforms require. A good OTT app development company will be able to architect cloud infrastructure to handle streaming workloads, implementing auto-scaling groups, load balancers, and distributed databases that can maintain required performance under any load.

What you can't measure, you can't improve. Advanced monitoring and analytics systems collect and examine critical metrics such as buffering ratio, initialization time, distribution of video quality, frequency of re-buffering, and playback failures. These metrics can be collected across devices, geographies, and network conditions.

Real-time monitoring allows your teams to be alerted about problems prior to them affecting a wide set of users. Your Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics will show how the real-time streaming performance impacts user satisfaction and engagement, which will provide insight for ongoing iterative improvement.

An advanced ott app development company should provide solutions including custom analytics dashboards that visualize streaming health in real-time allowing your team to proactively fix problems and make data-centric decisions for infrastructure.

Decreasing buffering and enhancing quality is not a simple undertaking, and must be approached with intelligent encoding, a robust infrastructure, adoption of adaptive streaming technologies, and continuous monitoring. Although the underlying technical complexity may appear overwhelming, having a specialized ott app development company as a partner will put your platform in a position to meet the expectations for seamless views of acceptable quality modern audiences expect.

The streaming world continues to evolve based on new developments in technology (5G networks, edge computing, and AI-based optimization) so for companies to stay ahead of the curve requires an ongoing effort not only to adopt best practices today, but also to architect their platform with tomorrow's technologies in mind. Your OTT application development partner along with your diligence in pursuing streaming excellence, can create OTT applications that keep viewers engaged, delighted, and returning for more.