TIERED CONTENT STREAMING

Techniques for providing live content at different quality levels to a user device include advertising content availability at multiple quality levels for selection by the user device, receiving a quality level selection from the user device, wherein the quality level selection matches one of the advertised multiple quality levels, determining whether the received quality level selection differs from a currently used quality level, when it is determined that the received quality level selection is different from the currently used quality level, reconfiguring a transcoder to transcode the live content to only the received quality level, and updating a metafile to include a first quality level at a first bitrate lower than a bitrate for the received quality level selection and a second quality level at a second bitrate higher than the bitrate for the received quality level selection.