Starting Bitrate

Starting Bitrate measures the average bitrate, in Kbps, at which sessions begin playing, aggregated across all ended plays.

Updated 2026-07-27 starting-bitrate

Note:  Many devices do not report the starting bitrate for MPEG DASH assets because they do not capture it. This occurs because the starting bitrate is based on the average starting bitrate, often resulting in it being seen as 0.

For aggregation, this metric shows the sum of the joined average bit rate in Kbps for all sessions divided by the sum of ended plays for all sessions.

Starting Bitrate is an Ended type metrics that is calculated only for the sessions that have ended.

Distributions

  • Starting Bitrate vs Ended Plays Distribution: a distribution by preset buckets, where each bucket is the average of the Starting Bitrate that occurred for the respective amount of Ended Plays.

    You can use metric filtering to diagnose only the sessions that had high percentage of dropped frames. For more details on metric filters, see Metric filtering.

Related Details

Metric Details

Description

Dashboards and Metric Presentation

  • Trends ( time series and distribution)

  • MetricLens
  • Viewer Session
  • Viewer Module

Dimensions

Use MetricLens dimensions to filter this metric by metadata segments for enhanced root cause analysis. For example, limiting data to specific assets and location dimensions can highlight the conditions of Starting Bitrate.

Diagnostics

The Diagnostic page presents information of the Starting bitrate metric. For more information about diagnosis with this metric, see Diagnostics.

Manual Alert Support

No

AI Alert Support

No

Metric Adjustment

None

For more metric definitions, see the Metric Dictionary.