Terms

Stream ingest

Stream ingest delivers audio and video data from your source to an ApsaraVideo Live center, where the content is processed and prepared for delivery.

Stream pulling

Stream pulling uploads third-party streaming URLs to an ApsaraVideo Live center for accelerated content delivery. Use stream pulling when your content originates from an external source rather than a direct ingest connection.

Streaming

Streaming delivers live streams from an ApsaraVideo Live center to a player for playback. This is the outbound leg of the pipeline: from the live center to your viewers.

Edge ingest

Edge ingest routes your streaming data to the nearest point of presence (POP) first, then uses the Alibaba Cloud intelligent scheduling system to transmit the data to an ApsaraVideo Live center. With wide POP coverage and optimized uplink networks, edge ingest reduces stuttering and slow stream pulling caused by poor uplink conditions.

Global acceleration

Global acceleration establishes optimized network paths between your video capture location and the playback origin. Backed by Alibaba Cloud infrastructure, it routes traffic over the shortest, highest-quality links between capture and playback regions—resolving high latency and stuttering for global audiences without additional hardware investment.

Real-Time Streaming (RTS)

The RTS feature is built on ApsaraVideo Live. RTS monitors latency across the entire live streaming pipeline, rebuilds the CDN transmission protocol, and optimizes underlying transport technologies including User Datagram Protocol (UDP). RTS SDK is integrated with ApsaraVideo Player SDK.

RTS supports tens of millions of concurrent playback requests at millisecond-level latency. Use RTS to eliminate stuttering, enable instant loading, and maintain smooth playback for latency-sensitive scenarios such as live auctions, sports, and interactive broadcasts.

Live stream transcoding

Live stream transcoding converts a video stream to another video stream by modifying parameters such as encoding format, resolution, or bitrate. Use live stream transcoding to deliver the same content across different devices and network conditions, serving viewers with varying bandwidth, device capabilities, and latency requirements.

Narrowband HD™

Narrowband HD™ is an Alibaba Cloud proprietary encoding optimization technology built on the human vision model. It applies different encoding policies to different images, reducing video bitrate by 30% to 50% while maintaining the same perceptual quality—delivering high-definition streams with significantly less bandwidth consumption.

Time shifting

Time shifting lets viewers rewind and watch content from a specific point within a live stream—similar to DVR functionality for live broadcasts. ApsaraVideo Live implements time shifting at the segment level. A strict verification mode prevents dirty data and image discontinuity caused by incorrect timestamps in the source signal.

Ingest domain

An ingest domain receives live streams. To use ApsaraVideo Live, register an ingest domain and apply for an Internet Content Provider (ICP) filing. After you add a CNAME record, associate the ingest domain with a streaming domain, and optionally configure URL signing, use the URL generator in the ApsaraVideo Live console to generate an ingest URL.

Streaming domain

A streaming domain delivers live streams to viewers. To use ApsaraVideo Live, register a streaming domain and apply for an ICP filing. After you add a CNAME record, associate an ingest domain with the streaming domain, and optionally configure URL signing, use the URL generator in the ApsaraVideo Live console to generate a streaming URL.

CNAME

A CNAME (Canonical Name record) is a DNS alias that maps your accelerated domain name to an Alibaba Cloud CDN endpoint. After you add an accelerated domain name in the Alibaba Cloud Management Console, a CNAME in the format *.*kunlun*.com is assigned to you. Add a CNAME record to your Domain Name System (DNS) server to map the accelerated domain name to *.*kunlun*.com. Once the record takes effect, ApsaraVideo Live handles domain resolution and redirects all requests to the POPs of ApsaraVideo Live, accelerating content delivery.

H.264

H.264—also known as AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and MPEG-4 Part 10—is a video compression standard designed by the Joint Video Team (JVT), jointly founded by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC JTC1 Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). H.264 is the industry default for video streaming, offering low bitrates, high image quality, strong fault tolerance, and broad network adaptability.

H.265

H.265—also known as HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding)—is a video compression standard developed by the ITU-T VCEG as the successor to H.264. Based on H.264, H.265 retains specific technologies used for H.264 and adopts new technologies for improvement, delivering higher video quality with improvements in stream relationships, encoding quality, latency, and algorithm complexity.

Live streaming URL

A live streaming URL identifies where to send or receive a stream. Live streaming URLs are divided into ingest URLs and streaming URLs. Each URL consists of a domain name, an AppName parameter, a StreamName parameter, and an optional access token. You can create multiple applications under a domain name and multiple live streams under each application. Use the URL generator in the ApsaraVideo Live console to generate ingest URLs and streaming URLs. You can use the generated ingest URLs in third-party stream ingest software such as Open Broadcaster Software (OBS).

AppName

AppName is the name of an application within which live streaming runs. It identifies the storage paths for media files of live streams under a given domain. When configuring OBS or another ingest tool, AppName is the application-level path component in the ingest URL.

StreamName

StreamName is the name of a live stream. Combined with a domain name, it uniquely identifies a single live stream.

Dual-stream disaster recovery

Dual-stream disaster recovery lets you ingest two streams with identical content to the same URL. When one stream encounters interruptions or stuttering, the system automatically switches to the other stream to maintain continuity and broadcast quality.