I got involved in a video streaming project for mobile last year. The back end had all sorts of aggressive dynamic bandwidth optimisation: start low, switch to a higher quality if you can and so on. I told the dev team they were making assumptions about internal mobile network topology that they couldn&#x27;t possibly know and that it would bite them. It did. So badly in fact that there was a dispute about deliverables between them and the owner of the brand. Their solution didn&#x27;t work well on some carriers and was almost unusable on others. Looking back, I&#x27;m sure it was because of some of the issues raised in this presentation.<p>Over a long weekend, I cobbled together a very basic ffmpeg and nginx-rtmp-module solution using fixed low bandwidth videos (about 8k per second which works on EDGE very nicely - think Africa). It not only ran better - mobile networks don&#x27;t mind giving you a small slice as long as it&#x27;s predictable - but used about half a million dollars less hardware on our side.