Understanding Video Management Planes

Abstract: While Internet video control and data planes have received much research attention, little is known about the video management plane. In this paper, using data from more than a hundred video publishers spanning two years, we characterize the video management plane and its evolution. The management plane shows significant diversity with respect to video packaging, playback device support, and CDN use, and current trends suggest increasing diversity in some of these dimensions. This diversity adds complexity to management, and we show that the complexity of many management tasks is sub-linearly correlated with the number of hours a publisher’s content is viewed. Moreover, today each publisher runs an independent management plane, and this practice can lead to sub-optimal outcomes for syndicated content, such as redundancies in CDN storage and loss of control for content owners over delivery quality.

Zahaib Akhtar, Yun Seong Nam, Jessica Chen, Ramesh Govindan, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Sanjay Rao, Jibin Zhan, Hui Zhang.
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