YouSlow: A Performance Analysis Tool for Adaptive Bitrate Video Streaming

Adaptive bitrate (ABR) technologies are being widely used in today's popular HTTP-based video streaming such as You Tube and Netflix. Such a rate-switching algorithm embedded in a video player is designed to improve video quality-of-experience (QoE) by selecting an appropriate resolution based on the analysis of network conditions while the video is playing. However, a bad viewing experience is often caused by the video player having difficulty estimating transit or client-side network conditions accurately. In order to analyze the ABR streaming performance, we developed YouSlow, a web browser plug-in that can detect and report live buffer stalling events to our analysis tool. Currently, YouSlow has collected more than 20,000 of You Tube video stalling events over 40 countries.