Don’t make your viewers wait.

Too often, in the blind quest for quality, people encode movies at far too high a bitrate, making viewers wait needlessly before being able to watch the movie uninterrupted.

The Bitrate Budget Calculator is a sophisticated modeling algorithm that takes five factors into account to help you determine what your movie’s bitrate limit should be based on your particular situation.

The factors are:

• Viewer connection speed
• Maximum simultaneous viewers
• Maximum acceptable wait time
• Average movie length
• Server bandwidth

Let’s get progressive.

“Progressive download” means, as soon as your viewers click to view a particular movie, the movie starts downloading to a hidden cache file on the users machine.

As soon as enough of the movie has downloaded to provide the user with an uninterrupted viewing experience, the movie begins playing (if it’s set to: autoplay = “true”).

With a movie that is encoded at a lower bitrate than the total bandwidth of the connection between the movie server and the viewer, the movie will start playing within a second or two, and continue without stopping. This is obviously the goal to aspire to for most purposes.

The Bitrate Budget Calculator will help you determine what that magic formula is for your server, movies and viewers.