Bandwidth Requirements for Digital Campus

Owned by Eric Brown
Last updated: Apr 12, 2016
1 min read

Problem

What are the general bandwidth requirements for Digital Campus?

Solution

Digital Campus titles are encoded to support Adaptive Bitrate Streaming in order to be an network friendly as possible. For more information on adaptive bitrate streaming please see the following article here. Each title is encoded on our storage location at 5 bit rates:

  • 3 Mb/sec @720p
  • 2 Mb/sec @720p
  • 1.2 Mb/sec @720p
  • 1.5 Mb/sec @480p
  • 800 Kb/sec @480p

The bitrate streamed to the client device depends upon both device and network characteristics. These characteristics include: screen resolution, cpu availability, graphics processor, network bandwidth and speed available. As the network becomes more congested, the client device player will automatically request lower resolution playback (down to 800) to avoid buffering. If the bandwidth is insufficient to support the lowest bitrate, then the title will buffer. Within a specific environment, it is impossible to determine exactly what bandwidth will be used to playback content. Absolute minimum requirements would be the minimum bitrate * number of simultaneous streams occurring. 

When title playback is paused, no content is downloaded to the client device (outside of a small buffer). Due to this implementation, a paused stream does not consume any bandwidth.