Thursday, June 05, 2008

IPTV Viewing Habits and Netflix Player

The IPTPS 2008 has an interesting paper on exploiting TV Viewing Habits to reduce the traffic on the ISP backbone generated by IPTV consumers.

"On Next-Generation Telco-Managed P2P TV Architectures" by Meeyoung Cha (KAIST), Pablo Rodriguez (Telefonica Research, Barcelona), Sue Moon (KAIST), and Jon Crowcroft (University of Cambridge).


In this paper the authors analyze the utilization o P2P content distribution techniques to reduce network overhead in a Internet Service Provider IPTV infrastructure. To exploit the patterns of channel holding time, channel popularity and the correlation between the time of the day and the number of viewers, the authors propose a locality-aware P2P content distribution scheme that reduces the traffic on the ISP backbone.

From the paper:

we ascertain the sweet spots and the overheads of server-based unicast, multicast, and serverless P2P and also show the empirical lower bound network cost of P2P (where cost reduction is up to 83% compared to current IP multicast distribution

[...]

We believe that our work provides valuable insights to service providers in designing the next-generation IPTV architecture. Especially, it highlights that dedicated multicast is useful for few of the extremely popular channels and that P2P can handle a much larger number of channels while imposing very little demand for infrastructure.


This week I saw some news on the internal characteristics of the Netflix Player. Immediately, I thought of the paper from IPTPS as a possible optimization to the Netflix Player.

The NetFlix player is supposed to use the conventional broadband connection, as opposed to well provisioned IPTV architectures described in Cha et al. Perhaps, the locality-aware P2P content distribution technique is even more interesting in the Netflix Player case.

Nevertheless, the viewing habits and interest sharing among Netflix users may differ dramatically from what is observed in the IPTV environment, which would impact the efficiency of the locality-aware P2P content distribution.

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