Playback Startup Latency: What to Measure First
A simple measurement order for reducing user-perceived startup delay in media products.
Teams often start optimization from codecs or CDN tuning. That can help, but only after basic path breakdown is clear.
Start with three segments:
- Session setup latency
- First-byte-to-first-frame latency
- Buffer stabilization latency
The biggest gains usually come from reducing retries and eliminating avoidable round trips in startup orchestration.