Promotion of content availability by playlist viewers in CDN-P2P systems

This paper assesses the effectiveness of playlists for improving the content availability in CDN-P2P networks that distributes YouTube-like videos. Real data collected from YouTube was used and the popularity patterns of playlists and first page videos were characterized. Moreover, the impact of playlist viewers on content availability was evaluated. Results show that the improvement in content availability is about 40% for highly connected playlist viewers. For systems with less connected playlist viewers, the improvement exceeds 20% for different scenarios.