On excess bandwidth usage of video streaming: when video resolution mismatches browser viewport

Video streaming is, without a doubt, the most dominant application on the Internet. Each time a video streaming platform (e.g., YouTube, Dailymotion or Netflix) is requested, the browser loads a web page, setups the video player, then retrieves and renders the requested content. The video streaming transmission is based on the dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) which takes into consideration the underlying network conditions (e.g., delay, loss rate and throughput) and the terminal characteristics (viewport) to select the video resolution to request from the server. We question in this work the efficiency of this transmission in taking into account the terminal characteristics, the viewport in particular, knowing that requesting a resolution exceeding the viewport results in waste of bandwidth. Such bandwidth waste can either save money when the user is on a pay as you go data plane, or steal bandwidth from other users who are in need for it to further improve their Quality of Experience (QoE). To narrow the stats, we present a controlled experimental framework that leverages the YouTube and Dailymotion video players and the Chrome web request API to assess the impact of browser viewport on the observed video resolution pattern [1]–[3]. In a first attempt of kind, we use the observed patterns to quantify the amount of wasted bandwidth. Our data-driven analysis points to high sensitivity of the Dailymotion player toward small viewports (240×144 and 400×225) compared to the YouTube player resulting in 15% and 8 % less bandwidth waste respectively. However, as the users shift toward large viewports, the YouTube player becomes more viewport friendly compared to the Dailymotion player with shows an estimated bandwidth waste of 28%.