However, practically speaking, the entire catalogue of devices, expected network connections and network costs must be considered when designing layers.

Apple and Adobe provide excellent starting points with suggested profiles suitable for their ecosystems. The selection of optimal bit rates, frame sizes and frame resolutions will vary depending upon device types, connection types and encoding technology. The necessary packaging will naturally become apparent as a result. As a result, one should catalogue both the devices and the players that will be supported. Not every device supports players for every type of ABR streaming technology. Packaging choice is generally driven by what devices must be supported. For an extra layer of encryption keys can be served over SSL. HLS content can be encrypted with AES-128 using an existing or randomly generated key.

ability to use both HLS and MPEG-DASH manifests for the same media files which allows for broader compatibility across different players.

there are fewer files to manage which can translate into savings on storage space.

improved caching performance as the media player is walking through a larger file in a sequence rather than downloading each segment from different location.HTTP byte range requests allow to specify segments as byte range of a larger URL and consolidate segments into single large file. In 2016 Apple added byte-range addressing for fragmented MP4 files. References to the segmented files are contained in. Originally HLS used H.264 as video codec encapsulated by MPEG-2 TS chunks. It is natively supported on OSX, iOS, Android 4.1+ and Windows 10. HLS is media streaming protocol developed by Apple for iOS, Apple TV and OS X that over time has gained support on number of other platforms due to its popularity.

Encoding in the cloud