Abstract

This paper investigates HTTP streaming traffic from an ISP perspective. As streaming traffic now represents nearly half of the residential Internet traffic, understanding its characteristics is important. We focus on two major video sharing sites, YouTube and DailyMotion. We use ten packet traces from a residential ISP network, five for ADSL and five for FTTH customers, captured between 2008 and 2011. Covering a time span of four years allows us to identify changes in the service infrastructure of some providers. From the packet traces, we infer for each streaming flow the video characteristics, such as duration and encoding rate, as well as TCP flow characteristics. Using additional information from the BGP routing tables allows us to identify the originating Autonomous System (AS). With this data, we can uncover: the server side distribution policy, the impact of the serving AS on the flow characteristics and the impact of the reception quality on user behavior. A unique aspect of our work is how to measure the reception quality of the video and its impact on the viewing behavior. We see that not even half of the videos are fully downloaded. For short videos of 3 minutes or less, users stop downloading at any point, while for videos longer than 3 minutes, users either stop downloading early on or fully download the video. When the reception quality deteriorates, fewer videos are fully downloaded, and the decision to interrupt download is taken earlier. We conclude that (i) the video sharing sites have a major control over the delivery of the video and its reception quality through DNS resolution and server side streaming policy, and (ii) that only half of the videos are fully downloaded and that this fraction dramatically drops when the video reception quality is bad.