Social video consumption: Synchronized viewing experiences across devices and networks

Abstract

The consumption of video in context of social interactions is becoming reality, as borders between television, video, microblogging and social networking are disappearing. This paper discusses the problem of quality of experience and synchronized video viewing across heterogeneous device and networks ecosystem. The proposed solution, which is still work in progress, builds upon network coding and traffic engineering to achieve maximum goodput across devices and networks, while preserving fairness between flows and meeting quality of experience requirements. The proposed approach has been designed for both real time and non real time content. We present preliminary results for the non-real case, in which the viewers use essentially FTP-like downloads to view and exchange the content.