Video Delivery Performance of a Large-Scale VoD System and the Implications on Content Delivery

Video delivery performance is the main factor that affects Internet video quality. Characterizing the video delivery performance, especially the delivery throughput, can help content providers as well as Internet service providers (ISPs) in system optimization and network planning. Based on a unique dataset consisting of 20 million video download speed measurements , this paper comprehensively studies the video delivery throughput of a large-scale commercial video-on- demand (VoD) system. We observe that user speed exhibits a large variation over time of day as well as across provincial locations. In particular, the worst performance of day is 30% lower than the peak performance . The analysis also reveals that video download speed has a notable impact on Internet video quality, which in turn influences user engagement . The impact, however, becomes limited when the speed increases beyond a certain threshold, which is mostly dependent on the video encoded bitrates. We further examine the interaction between Internet infrastructure and video delivery throughput using the linear regression model and find that crossing the ISP or regional network border yields 15-20% speed loss. Based on these observations , we finally evaluate the potential of edge caching and hybrid CDN-P2P in the improvement of video download performance and video quality.