Confused, timid, and unstable: picking a video streaming rate is hard

  • Authors:

  • Te-Yuan Huang;Nikhil Handigol;Brandon Heller;Nick McKeown;Ramesh Johari

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Internet measurement conference
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Today's commercial video streaming services use dynamic rate selection to provide a high-quality user experience. Most services host content on standard HTTP servers in CDNs, so rate selection must occur at the client. We measure three popular video streaming services -- Hulu, Netflix, and Vudu -- and find that accurate client-side bandwidth estimation above the HTTP layer is hard. As a result, rate selection based on inaccurate estimates can trigger a feedback loop, leading to undesirably variable and low-quality video. We call this phenomenon the "downward spiral effect", and we measure it on all three services, present insights into its root causes, and validate initial solutions to prevent it.