Understanding internet video viewing behavior in the wild

Abstract

Over the past few years video viewership over the Internet has risen dramatically and market predictions suggest that video will account for more than 50% of the traffic over the Internet in the next few years. Unfortunately, there has been signs that the Content Delivery Network (CDN) infrastructure is being stressed with the increasing video viewership load. Our goal in this paper is to provide a first step towards a principled understanding of how the content delivery infrastructure must be designed and provisioned to handle the increasing workload by analyzing video viewing behaviors and patterns in the wild. We analyze various viewing behaviors using a dataset consisting of over 30 million video sessions spanning two months of viewership from two large Internet video providers. In these preliminary results, we observe viewing patterns that have significant impact on the design of the video delivery infrastructure.