Measuring Decentralized Video Streaming: A Case Study of DTube

The majority of Internet traffic originates from a handful of large-scale video streaming services such as YouTube or Netflix, which continue to grow rapidly. These trends result in traffic and content centralization, which have raised increased awareness of the importance of more decentralized solutions to promote a more open Internet. While P2P-based, decentralized video streaming has been proposed and studied in the past, more novel solutions have not been investigated yet. One recent example is DTube, a video streaming platform which leverages decentralized technologies for content delivery and curation. In this study, our goal is to assess the viability of novel decentralized video streaming services, using DTube as an example. We develop and present an Android application to measure connectivity and performance of both DTube and YouTube over WiFi and cellular networks. We collect measurements over a period of 10 months (2019) and from four different cellular ISPs across three different countries. Analyzing the results, we find that streaming videos from DTube is by and large comparable to streaming from YouTube, although we notice a lack of geographically distributed DTube servers and caches. Nevertheless, the results indicate that decentralized video streaming may present a feasible alternative to centralized services in the future.