dbendixen

king editor the grate said:

Buh, I'm not familiar with the way such things are engineered, but is it possible the bit rate is high because few people are using the service? And, thus, it will drop when it becomes more popular?

No, there’s no link to the number of users and the quality offered. Unless Apple doesn’t want to fork over the money to the CDN providers when they have millions of subs.

The way streaming services work is they generate a piece of encoded content and then segment it into 4-8 sec chunks (sometimes vice versa). These are organized with playlists or manifests that tell the player what segment to play in what order. All these files are pushed out to content delivery networks which are composed of hundreds or thousands of servers for high availability and scalability. And, generally, they can scale on demand.