Before Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch put pen to paper to take over TikTok’s US operations from ByteDance, they might want to consider that one of the Chinese company’s network boffins thinks the app and others like it create “massive data wastage”.
News of that finding was the subject of a paper [PDF] titled “Wisely Optimizing Short Video Streaming for a User-Vendor Win-Win Outcome” presented at the SIGCOMM academic networking conference a couple of weeks ago.
The paper’s authors work at Columbia University, Renmin University of China, Tsinghua University, and ByteDance. Their work opens by observing “Short video streaming platforms widely employ video prefetching to ensure users’ quality of experience (QoE), but frequent user swipes lead to massive data wastage, creating a significant financial burden for vendors.”
The paper notes the popularity of short video apps and cites the billions of people who use TikTok and Kwai as evidence, before explaining that clients for these services usually prefetch videos they think users will want to watch in the future and store them in local buffers.
After studying Douyin and Kuaishou, the Chinese versions of TikTok and Kwai, the authors found both prefetch “the first chunk of the next few videos” in the hope doing so improves the user experience. In reality, the authors assert, the practice “will result in remarkable video stalls and prefetched but discarded chunks.”
The authors think those discards account for “over 40 percent of the streaming vendors’ data transfer costs” and suggest they need to change the way they prefetch videos to save money.
The paper suggests existing alternative QoE mechanisms can’t help, because their developers designed them for conventional video on demand services. The authors therefore developed their own QoE framework.
“Prefetching must be guided by both user swiping behavior, which strongly correlates with user interest and satisfaction; and network condition, which impacts both streaming efficiency and viewing experience,” the paper states, before outlining how their proposed framework delivers a better experience for users who actually watch videos instead of constantly swiping their apps in search of something more entertaining.
The framework also “wisely determines the download order and bitrate of each video chunk, to prevent either data wastage or rebuffering caused by prefetching more or less content.”
The authors assert that their framework “achieves a true user-vendor win-win outcome” because users of short video apps enjoy a better experience and app operators get lower bills.
Whoever ends up operating TikTok in the USA can obviously benefit from this research, which China funded under its National Key Research and Development Program. ®