How to reduce bandwidth costs from my existing online video provider?

If you are currently using an expensive online provider to handle your traffic or if you just want to consider cost savings on streaming operations, consider adding a secondary provider that can take on a majority of the traffic (and keep the original material, as it is acting as a repeater of the original stream), but still have the ability to fall back to your primary provider when needed, especially if there are no subscription, no fixed costs involved.

Some online video providers can charge more than 15x more than iReplay.TV for bandwidth (traffic), so it might work to consider adding it as a secondary or primary source for delivery

There are more cost-effective options for online video providers mainly when those OVP rely on well-known and expensive Content Delivery Networks like AWS Cloudfront and Akamai (CDN).

By using a “repeater” feature, you can not only add more resilience to your live streaming or VOD streaming but also save on traffic costs by using the cheapest provider as players will choose the source you defined as primary by default and switch to the secondary one(s) if the first source is failing.

How do players handle HLS failover

HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) is a protocol used to deliver video content over the internet. It breaks the content into small chunks, called segments, and stores them on a server. These segments are then delivered to the player in a specific order, allowing the player to play the video.

Failover refers to the process of switching to an alternate source of the video in case the primary source is unavailable.

HLS players handle failover by using a technique called "playlist redundancy". This technique involves creating multiple copies of the video on different servers and providing the player with a list of all the available servers, called a "playlist". If the primary server is unavailable, the player can switch to an alternate server in the list.

The HLS protocol also includes a mechanism called "EXT-X-MEDIA" that allows to define different streams, each with different bitrate, resolution, and codecs and that can be used as a fallback in case of any failure.

The players can also use different quality levels of the same video stream and automatically switch to a lower quality level if the network conditions are poor. This is known as Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR) and is widely used with HLS.

By using ”failover repeater”, you will get a new iframe/embed/m3u8 code to integrate into your website or mobile app.