Understanding Viewing Engagement and Video Quality in a Large-scale Mobile Video System

With the advances in wireless communication and the growing popularity of mobile devices, it has become rather normal to watch videos using mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets. In order to improve user engagement in mobile video sessions, it is important for content providers and CDN operators to understand the correlations between video quality and Quality of Experience (QoE) of mobile users. In this paper, we measure how video quality metrics affect user engagement, and identify several counter-intuitive relationships, based on the large-scale trace data from a famous IPTV provider. We discover the internal causes of these relationships later, which give us new insights about how we improve user engagement. Based on our new insights, we further design a user engagement prediction framework to let content providers predict how long viewers will remain in video sessions with specific video quality metrics. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the prediction framework by the real-world data.