Evaluation of the Benefits of Variable Segment Durations for Adaptive Streaming

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is the de-facto standard for video delivery over the Internet. It enables the dynamic adaptation of video quality by splitting the video clip into small segments and providing multiple quality levels per segment. Current HAS streaming services typically utilize segments of equal durations. However, this leads to video encoding overhead as segments have to start with I -frames, independently of the encoded video content. In this paper we evaluate the prospects of variable segment durations, where video segments are aligned to the video characteristics. We evaluate the reduction of the encoding overhead and investigate its impact on the stalling probability using a theoretical model. It turns out that the variable approach outperforms the fixed approach in 86% of the evaluated cases with respect to video stalls.