Smart Streaming for Online Video Services

TL;DR

This paper proposes a smart streaming approach for online video services that predicts user behavior to optimize bandwidth usage and enhance user experience, demonstrated through measurements, prototypes, and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel smart streaming method based on user behavior prediction to improve QoE and reduce bandwidth waste in online video delivery.

Findings

Smart streaming reduces bandwidth waste by predicting user departures.

Prototype implementation shows improved QoE with limited bandwidth.

Simulations confirm bandwidth savings and user satisfaction benefits.

Abstract

Bandwidth consumption is a significant concern for online video service providers. Practical video streaming systems usually use some form of HTTP streaming (progressive download) to let users download the video at a faster rate than the video bitrate. Since users may quit before viewing the complete video, however, much of the downloaded video will be "wasted". To the extent that users' departure behavior can be predicted, we develop smart streaming that can be used to improve user QoE with limited server bandwidth or save bandwidth cost with unlimited server bandwidth. Through measurement, we extract certain user behavior properties for implementing such smart streaming, and demonstrate its advantage using prototype implementation as well as simulations.