Bandwidth-aware Prefetching for Proactive Multi-video Preloading and Improved HAS Performance

This paper considers the problem of providing users playing one streaming video the option of instantaneous and seamless playback of alternative videos. Recommendation systems can easily provide a list of alternative videos, but there is little research on how to best eliminate the startup time for these alternative videos. The problem is motivated by services that want to retain increasingly impatient users, who frequently watch the beginning of multiple videos, before viewing a video to the end. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of an HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming (HAS) solution that provides careful prefetching and buffer management. We also present the design and evaluation of three fundamental policy classes that provide different tradeoffs between how aggressively new alternative videos are prefetched versus the importance of ensuring high playback quality. We show that our solution allows us to reduce the startup times of alternative videos by an order of...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MM
• Authors: Vengatanathan Krishnamoorthi, Niklas Carlsson, Derek L. Eager, Anirban Mahanti, Nahid Shahmehri
• Keywords: MM 2015, Multimedia