HTTP Live Streaming Bandwidth Management Using Intelligent Segment Selection

HTTP-based segmented delivery has become a popular choice for video distribution. The ability for clients to explicitly perform dynamic bitrate adaptation on segment boundaries has allowed clients to optimize the end user viewing experience. Client-based rate adaptation schemes, though, are typically greedy in nature and within the context of the network as a whole, these schemes may be sub-optimal. In this paper we propose a congestion-aware rate adaptation scheme that works on top of existing segmented delivery protocols to provide network bandwidth management and fairness. We examine the HTTP Live Streaming approach and compare our community-based approach with the native Apple® implementation, though the framework is extendable to other protocols. We show the improved user experience with our scheme through higher quality video delivery and lower bitrate selection thrashing.