Bitrate Ladder

Explanation

A bitrate ladder is the collection of different video quality levels (resolution and bitrate combinations) that a streaming service encodes for each piece of content. For example, Netflix may encode a single film at 10+ different quality levels ranging from 240p at 300 Kbps to 4K at 25+ Mbps. The adaptive bitrate player selects the most appropriate rung of the ladder based on the viewer's current network conditions, switching dynamically to maintain smooth playback.