Characterizing Client Behavior of Commercial Mobile Video Streaming Services

HTTP Adaptive Streaming dominates most of the traffic on the Internet today and a large fraction is driven by video consumption on mobile phones and tablet devices. The client player implementations from different popular commercial services make different parameter and architectural choices, which result from heterogeneous APIs and device limitations. As a result, they exhibit quite different behaviors even for the same service, with very different traffic consumption characteristics. In this paper, we examine three major streaming services -- Netflix, Youtube, and Hulu, over the two dominant mobile platforms -- iOS and Android, in order to understand the impact of these design choices. We infer detailed session behavior based on passively collected packet traces over a large set of experiments across the providers and network types. We discover varying amounts of "redundant" traffic in the presence of bandwidth adaptation across the services, which negatively impacts network resources. We also find these design choices lead to unfairness in bandwidth consumption on shared networks across different platforms. In particular, we find the Android Netflix player is able to take a larger fraction of shared bandwidth when competing with the iOS implementation.