Smart Streaming for Online Video Services

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.