Measurement of a Large-Scale Short-Video Service Over Mobile and Wireless Networks

Short-video sharing services have seen explosive growth in recent years. Compared to conventional video sharing platforms, these have very different characteristics which are far from well-understood. This work aims at filling the gap by measuring and analyzing detailed application-level performance data from a top-10 short video service in China. The application-level data offered detailed and rare insights into many performance metrics of the service, which are otherwise inaccessible to external measurements. The service has a scale of over one billion daily views just for the mobile and wireless segments of the service. Our datasets covered over 22 billion video playbacks, over 100 million video files, served by over 5,000 servers to users across 35 provinces and 13 ISPs in China. We analyzed three aspects of the service: (a) video content characteristics; (b) network analytics; and (c) video streaming analytics. Our results revealed significant differences from conventional video-sharing platforms. These findings will have implications for system designs at all levels. The data also enabled us to conduct an indirect network performance measurement of mobile and wireless network services across China, as experienced by the service. These results offer rare insights into mobile and wireless networks' real-world performance in a large country.