HLS / DASH

What is it?

HLS (and its cousin DASH) is how live video is delivered to viewers. Instead of one continuous river of video, the stream is chopped into small chunks (a few seconds each), and the viewer's player downloads them one after another — like reading a book page by page instead of receiving it as one giant scroll.

This chunk-based approach is what lets millions of people watch the same stream at once, each on whatever internet speed they have.

Practical example

When you watch a live stream on YouTube in your browser, your player is quietly downloading small video chunks every few seconds. If your Wi-Fi slows down, the player automatically grabs lower-quality chunks so the video keeps playing instead of freezing — then switches back to HD when your connection recovers.

Key things to know (non-technical)

• It's the viewer-side protocol (delivery), the opposite end of the chain from RTMP/SRT (ingest).
• Works on basically every device: phones, browsers, smart TVs.
• Scales to huge audiences cheaply because the chunks can be cached and distributed worldwide.
• The trade-off: chunks introduce delay — classic HLS streams run 15–45 seconds behind reality.

In Tupic Live

HLS is what Tupic Live's own viewers would watch: the broadcast goes in via RTMP/SRT, gets processed, and comes out as HLS so any phone or browser can play it smoothly at any audience size.