Smart Streaming for Online Video Services
This addresses bandwidth efficiency for online video service providers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing HTTP streaming methods with added prediction capabilities.
The paper tackles the problem of wasted bandwidth in online video streaming due to users quitting early, by developing a smart streaming method that predicts user departure behavior to either improve user Quality of Experience with limited bandwidth or save bandwidth costs with unlimited bandwidth, demonstrating advantages through prototype implementation and simulations.
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.