application/vnd.apple.mpegurl

The .m3u8 manifest that drives HTTP Live Streaming: a UTF-8 text playlist listing media segments and variant streams, extended from the old M3U format with #EXT-X- tags. Apple shipped HLS with iOS 3.0 in 2009 and only formalized it as RFC 8216 in 2017 — an Independent Submission, not an IETF standard, so the spec documents Apple's protocol rather than a community design. RFC 8216 blesses two Content-Types, this one and audio/mpegurl; use this one. Every playlist must begin with the #EXTM3U tag, which doubles as the closest thing the format has to a signature.

.m3u8 signals UTF-8 HLS; plain .m3u playlists predate HLS and are often Latin-1.

Defined by RFC 8216 · IANA registration. Registry facts from the IANA media-types registry via mime-db.