No abstract

Catch-up", or on-demand access of previously broadcast TV content over the public Internet, constitutes a significant fraction of peak time network traffic. This paper analyses consumption patterns of nearly 6 million users of a nationwide deployment of a catch-up TV service, to understand the network support required. We find that catch-up has certain natural scaling properties compared to traditional TV: The on-demand nature spreads load over time, and users have much higher completion rates for content streams than previously reported. Users exhibit strong preferences for serialised content, and for specific genres. Exploiting this, we design a Speculative Content Offloading and Recording Engine (SCORE) that predictively records a personalised set of shows on user-local storage, and thereby offloads traffic that might result from subsequent catch-up access. Evaluations show that even with a modest storage of 32GB, an oracle with complete knowledge of user consumption can save up to 74% of the energy, and 97% of the peak bandwidth compared to the current IP streaming-based architecture. In the best case, optimising for energy consumption, SCORE can recover more than 60% of the traffic and energy savings achieved by the oracle. Optimising purely for traffic rather than energy can reduce bandwith by an additional 5%.

This study estimated the carbon footprint of watching broadcast television using digital terrestrial television and online delivery of video-on-demand.The carbon footprint for digital terrestrial television was found to be 0.088 kg CO 2 e/viewer-hour and for online delivery of video-on-demand ranges from 0.030-0.086 kg CO 2 e/viewer-hour. This was based mainly on the energy consumption in the use phase. Results were sensitive to the number of viewers per display.It was found that the largest environmental impact from watching television is due to the power consumption of the consumer equipment. This amounts to 76% of the total for digital terrestrial television and 78% and 37% for video-on-demand using desktop and laptop computers respectively. The trend for larger television screens which have higher power consumption could increase this.Programme production contributes 12% to 35% and distribution contributes 10-28%.It was found that the audience size of a digital terrestrial channel and whether or not an aerial amplifier was used have a large effect on which distribution method appears to be the most energy efficient.

In search of scalable solutions, CDNs are exploring P2P support. However, the benefits of peer assistance can be limited by various obstacle factors such as ISP friendlinessrequiring peers to be within the same ISP, bitrate stratificationthe need to match peers with others needing similar bitrate, and partial participation-some peers choosing not to redistribute content.This work relates potential gains from peer assistance to the average number of users in a swarm, its capacity, and empirically studies the effects of these obstacle factors at scale, using a monthlong trace of over 2 million users in London accessing BBC shows online. Results indicate that even when P2P swarms are localised within ISPs, up to 88% of traffic can be saved. Surprisingly, bitrate stratification results in 2 large sub-swarms and does not significantly affect savings. However, partial participation, and the need for a minimum swarm size do affect gains. We investigate improvements to gain from increasing content availability through two well-studied techniques: content bundlingcombining multiple items to increase availability, and historical caching of previously watched items. Bundling proves ineffective as increased server traffic from larger bundles outweighs benefits of availability, but simple caching can considerably boost traffic gains from peer assistance.

Using nine months of access logs comprising 1.9 Billion sessions to BBC iPlayer, we survey the UK ISP ecosystem to understand the factors affecting adoption and usage of a high bandwidth TV streaming application across different providers. We find evidence that connection speeds are important and that external events can have a huge impact for live TV usage. Then, through a temporal analysis of the access logs, we demonstrate that data usage caps imposed by mobile ISPs significantly affect usage patterns, and look for solutions. We show that product bundle discounts with a related fixed-line ISP, a strategy already employed by some mobile providers, can better support user needs and capture a bigger share of accesses. We observe that users regularly split their sessions between mobile and fixed-line connections, suggesting a straightforward strategy for offloading by speculatively pre-fetching content from a fixed-line ISP before access on mobile devices.