France’s Broadpeak has again broken the mold of conventional wisdom in OTT delivery by promoting server-side selection of video quality for ABR streaming in its latest S4Streaming package. Broadpeak is presenting this as a more efficient alternative approach to the client-side selection employed by every competing system as far as we can tell. Indeed, the company claims it is a “revolutionary technology that gives video service providers more control over streaming quality and bandwidth usage.” It is more a reinvention than a revolution because it does not just contradict the conventional approach but overturns the underlying philosophy of ABR streaming as set out in numerous whitepapers. That philosophy can be stated as “the client-side player determines available bit rate and…