Network level characterization of adaptive streaming over HTTP applications

Over the past years, multimedia applications have dramatically increased their share in the Internet traffic composition. Therefore, there is a strong interest from both industry and academia to develop techniques for improving user's quality of experience for multimedia services, especially video content. Adaptive streaming is a technology that allows adaptation of video quality to the current network conditions and to the client device. In this paper we characterize the network traffic behavior of two popular adaptive streaming environments, namely Netflix and YouTube. In our experiments we observed their behavior under different constraints and varying network conditions. We found out that Netflix has overall better performance, even though both players behave poorly under bandwidth and packet loss constraints. In the delay constrained scenario, they nearly reached their regular behavior.