Quality of experience of commercially deployed adaptive media players

摘要

In the past decade we observed the transition from push-based, fully managed media streaming to pull-based, unmanaged adaptive HTTP streaming thanks to enhancements in media compression, network capacity, and client capabilities. Adaptive media players, specifically their algorithms, have been subject to research for a long time and lead to various approaches documented in the literature. In the past years we witnessed more and more commercial deployments taking into account findings presented in scientific papers but a quantitative evaluation and assessments of its performance is missing. In this paper, we propose means for the automated performance evaluation of commercially deployed adaptive media players with respect to i) objective, well-known metrics, such as bitrate, stalls, startup delay and ii) derived/calculated metrics (instability, inefficiency, average bitrate) previously proposed in the literature. Additionally, we propose a new metric (Bandwidth index) to measure the effectiveness of bandwidth utilization and together with existing QoE models for adaptive HTTP streaming (focusing on stalls, startup delay) we demonstrate its usefulness in this domain.