Technical whitepaper

High Efficiency Streaming Protocol (HESP)

Key takeaways

High Efficiency Streaming Protocol (HESP)

THEO developed a radically new HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) protocol. It was designed to improve user experience and engagement by:

  • Significantly reducing latency to allow for sub second latency;
  • Shortening zapping times to about 100ms to allow for similar to traditional broadcast experiences;
  • Bringing down bandwidth costs and optimising viewer bandwidth usage up to 20%; while still being scalable using HTTP CDNs, allowing for virtually endless scaling in a cost efficient manner.

As additional requirements, this protocol was designed to be integratable in existing video delivery pipelines and workflows, meaning it is compatible with existing encoders and 3rd party CDNs, only requiring changes within the packager and player.