Keep Calm and Don't Switch: About the Relationship Between Switches and Quality in HAS

Video streaming has established itself as the main method to consume multimedia content on the Internet. The most widespread technique is HTTP Adaptive Streaming which is used by large video service platforms such as YouTube and Netflix. In order to guarantee a high QoE, different adaptation strategies have been developed that lead to different video playout patterns. While some strategies may be more aggressive than others and often adapt the video quality, it is not clear which strategy is the best. In this paper, we want to identify the trade-off between the average video quality and switches in the quality during playout. We do this with a user-centric view and try to optimize the adaptation depending on the user preference with a quadratic program. This work allows us to put existing and future video adaptation algorithms in perspective with respect to user preferences. Our results show that the video quality can already be increased greatly by allowing few switches while more switches lead to diminishing gains. This is a novel discovery that is important for user-centric QoE-management which is of high interest for ISPs and video service providers.