Performance Measurement Study on Two Video Service Providers in China

This article describes how understanding the potential characteristics of video services is very important, as it can help users or third-party applications to predict performance or to identify service strategies. For this purpose, a measurement system deployed in 11 provinces and cities in China and monitoring two popular Web sites—Youku and Tudou—was designed. Through analyzing the measured records, it is obvious that the performance trend of the two service providers follows diurnal patterns, and it is consistent with users' accessing behavior. These two service providers share the underlying content delivery network to some extent, especially for the same content. The playing quality can also be guaranteed, typically for low-resolution content. Meanwhile, the user terminal's ISP is an important impact factor of service quality. In addition, how to predict the service performance online is also discussed, which is useful in some applications (e.g., video source recommendation systems).