How to Optimize ABR Video Delivery With Server-side Quality Control

With adaptive bitrate streaming, players evaluate the available bandwidth and perform their own quality selection. This approach has several drawbacks. In a fragmented market, each player has a different behavior, causing uneven end-user experiences. In addition, bandwidth evaluation (based on HTTP) may not work in the context of low-latency video streaming, impacting viewers? experience.

This paper will examine an innovative approach wherein the server performs its own bandwidth evaluation (relying on the underlying congestion control) and responds to a player?s segment request with its own selected quality. Experiments have shown the effectiveness of this approach in both unicast and multicast ABR contexts. As the quality selection is centralized, the behaviors of all players is homogeneous, and the service operator can change the selection strategy at any time, providing an unmatched level of control. Low-latency live streaming supports quality switching, since the server-side bandwidth estimate is not based on HTTP.

Guillaume Bichot | Broadpeak | Cesson-Sevign?, France
Pierre-Jean Gu?ry | Broadpeak | Cesson-Sevign?, France
Nicolas Le Scouarnec | Broadpeak | Cesson-Sevign?, France