Fast DASH bootstrap

Adaptive HTTP Streaming has become a widespread technology for delivering video to the end users. However, this technology usually suffers from various latencies, requiring an initial delay before playback. This is problematic for low delay or interactive applications, such as gaming or live event webcasting. A long initial waiting time is perceived by most users as bad quality, or even non-working content. In this paper, we review the causes of initial delays in MPEG-DASH and common strategies used to reduce this latency. We propose a new method based on HTTP/1.1 and compatible with existing infrastructures for the initial setup of an MPEG-DASH session. We compare our proposal to several existing approaches based on HTTP/1.x and on the HTTP/2 server push technique. Our experimental results show that 2 RTTs can be avoided and that the total downloaded size is reduced by 25% when using HTTP/1.1 and by 20% in HTTP/2 with similar latency.