Streaming Video Bitrate: What It Is and Why It Is Important

Streaming bitrate is a measure of how many bits of information it takes to represent one second of video, expressed as kilobits per second (Kbps) or megabits per second (Mbps). It is an important consideration when streaming because while higher bitrate may seem to equate to higher quality, this is only true if there is sufficient end-to-end bandwidth to support it. Bitrate is just one of four principal components of streaming video quality; the others are resolution, frame rate, and compression. Video resolution represents the height and width of the video image, while frame rate is the frequency at which consecutive images (frames) are displayed or captured. Compression is the process of encoding a digital stream in a way that requires less bandwidth than the original. Bitrate impacts streaming quality by determining the size of the video file and the speed of data transfer, but it must be balanced with other factors such as bandwidth, resolution, and frame rate to ensure optimal performance.