Can You See What I See? Quality-of-Experience Measurements of Mobile Live Video Broadcasting

Abstract

Broadcasting live video directly from mobile devices is rapidly gaining popularity with applications like Periscope and Facebook Live. The quality of experience (QoE) provided by these services comprises many factors, such as quality of transmitted video, video playback stalling, end-to-end latency, and impact on battery life, and they are not yet well understood. In this article, we examine mainly the Periscope service through a comprehensive measurement study and compare it in some aspects to Facebook Live. We shed light on the usage of Periscope through analysis of crawled data and then investigate the aforementioned QoE factors through statistical analyses as well as controlled small-scale measurements using a couple of different smartphones and both versions, Android and iOS, of the two applications. We report a number of findings including the discrepancy in latency between the two most commonly used protocols, RTMP and HLS, surprising surges in bandwidth demand caused by the Periscope app’s chat feature, substantial variations in video quality, poor adaptation of video bitrate to available upstream bandwidth at the video broadcaster side, and significant power consumption caused by the applications.