About 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The main technology to delivery YouTube content to various clients is HTTP adaptive streaming and the majority of today’s internet traffic comprises streaming audio and video. In this paper, we in- vestigate content provisioning for HTTP adaptive streaming under predefined aspects representing content features and upload charac- teristics as well and apply it to YouTube. Additionally, we compare the YouTube’s content upload and processing functions with a commercially available video encoding service. The results reveal insights into YouTube’s content upload and processing functions and the methodology can be applied to similar services. All experi- ments conducted within the paper allow for reproducibility thanks to the usage of open source tools, publicly available datasets, and scripts used to conduct the experiments on virtual machines.

1. Investigation of YouTube regarding Content
Provisioning for HTTP Adaptive Streaming
Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Timmerer
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (AAU)  Faculty of Technical Sciences (TEWI)  Department of Information
Technology (ITEC)  Multimedia Communication (MMC)  Sensory Experience Lab (SELab)
http://blog.timmerer.com  http://selab.itec.aau.at/  http://dash.itec.aau.at  christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at
Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) at bitmovin GmbH
http://www.bitmovin.com  christian.timmerer@bitmovin.com
23rd Packet Video Workshop, June 12, 2018
https://2018.packet.video/
http://www.slideshare.net/christian.timmerer

2. June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 2
$44,000,000

3. June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 4
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/
internet-minute-2018/

4. How does it work? In a nutshell…
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 5
Adaptation logic is within the
client, not normatively
specified by the standard,
subject to research and
development

5. Content Provisioning for HAS
• Definition of objective and quantifiable metrics describing content provisioning for
HAS (e.g., YouTube)
• Definition of a methodology and conducting experiments to gather these metrics
• Providing results and comparison with related service
• Dataset and scripts provided for reproducibility
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 6
Standard Delivery
Infrastructure (CDN)
Source Transcoding Encapsulation Encryption
Multiple representations
with different characteristics
Single highest-bitrate
representation
Multiple representations at
target encapsulation formats
Multiple streams with
multiple DRM formats
Encoding API
Player
Player API

6. Dataset
• Adopt standard dataset used in HAS
– http://dash.itec.aau.at/
• Big Buck Bunny
– Computer-animated sequences with large
homogeneous areas and moderate motion
• Tears of Steal
– Futuristic action short movie with special
effects and high motion
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 8
https://peach.blender.org/
https://mango.blender.org/

7. Aspects
• Various content features and upload characteristics
• Region
– Physical location of upload host/node
– North America, Europe, and Asia
• Time of Day
– Differences in the metrics throughout the day
with an interval set to two hours
• Content and video resolution
– See previous slide
– Input resolution: 2160p, 1080p, 720p, 480p and 360p
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 9

8. Metrics
• Video quality
– PSNR, SSIM, others (VMAF) under investigation
• Upload/processing time
– Bitmovin: content in the cloud already, massive parallel
encoding based on config., notifies user once output is available
– YouTube: upload, parallel encoding, 360p done ⇨ “finished” &
content is available; remaining representations done in
background
– Interesting observation: VP9 is produced in addition to AVC if
input resolution is ≥2160p; VP9 produced with increased
popularity; no upscaling of input (e.g., 720p input results into
HAS content up to 720p)June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 10

9. YouTube: Average vs. config. Bitrate
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 11

10. YouTube: Avg PSNR for all representations
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 12

11. YouTube: Avg SSIM for ≤1080p
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 13

12. YouTube: AVC vs. VP9
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 14

13. YouTube vs. Bitmovin for AVC
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 15

14. YouTube Upload and Processing per Region
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 16

15. YouTube Upload and Processing per Time of Day
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 17

16. YouTube average finished time per representation for 2160p input sequences
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 18

17. YouTube vs. Bitmovin: Comparison of Finished Times
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 19

18. Conclusions
• Summary
– Methodology to evaluate content provisioning for HAS
– Definition of aspects and metrics
• Findings
– Detecting flaws in HAS work flows
– Document best practices allowing for potential improvements
– Useful for making quantitative quality comparisons between different HAS
systems and services
• Future work
– Content types to investigate per-tile optimization
– Additional metrics
• Reproducibility
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 20
Armin Trattnig. 2017. An Investigation of YouTube’s Video
Streaming Service. Master’s thesis. Alpen-Adria-Universität,
Klagenfurt, Austria

19. Bitmovin kicks off NAB
show 2018 with a bang
● Announcing $30M in Series B
funding and exciting new
product launches
● And yes, we are hiring…
https://bitmovin.com/careers
21

20. Thank you for your attention
June 12, 2018 Dr. Timmerer [AAU/Bitmovin] 22
... questions, comments, etc. are welcome …
Priv.-Doz. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Christian Timmerer
Associate Professor
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Department of Information Technology (ITEC)
Universitätsstrasse 65-67, A-9020 Klagenfurt, AUSTRIA
christian.timmerer@itec.uni-klu.ac.at
http://blog.timmerer.com/
Tel: +43/463/2700 3621 Fax: +43/463/2700 3699
© Copyright: Christian Timmerer