Improve Quality of Experience for Mobile Instant Video Clip Sharing

With the rapid development of mobile networking and end-terminals, anytime and anywhere data access becomes readily available nowadays. Given the crowd sourced content capturing and sharing, the preferred length becomes shorter and shorter, even for such multimedia content as video. A representative is Twitter's Vine service, which, mainly targeting mobile users, enables them to create ultra-short video clips, and instantly post and share them with their followers. In this paper, we present an initial study on this new generation of instant video clip sharing service enabled by mobile platforms and explore the potentials for its further enhancement. Taking Vine as a case study, we closely investigate its unique user behaviors, revealing how such Vine-enabled anytime anywhere data access patterns differentiate mobile instant video clip sharing from its traditional counterparts. We then formulate a generic scheduling problem to maximize the user watching experience as well as the efficiency on the monetary and energy costs. To better solve it, we divide the problem into two sub problems, specifically, the pre-fetching scheduling problem and the watch-time download scheduling problem, and conquer them separately. We further demonstrate the preliminary evaluation result to show the superiority of our solution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on modeling and optimizing the instant video clip sharing on mobile devices.