Over the past two decades, the media industry has undergone a significant transformation, introducing a wave of new concepts and technologies such as OTT, streaming, connected TV, DASH, and HLS. Even as a streaming media professional, I often find myself going back to the basics; searching for clear definitions and practical explanations of these evolving terms. This blog aims to provide a simple and practical introduction to one such concept: What is HLS? What is HTTP live streaming (HLS)? HLS is an adaptive bitrate streaming protocol developed by Apple back in 2009 originally for devices in the Apple ecosystem. This streaming protocol delivers audio-video segments over standard HTTP connections with latency from 10 to 30 seconds. Although it is called HTTP live streaming, it is used for both on-demand video streaming and live streaming. A major advantage of HLS is its adaptive bitrate streaming. On the server side a stream can be encoded/transcoded in multiple renditions at various bitrates.…