Rebuffering. Since the 1950s, we’ve landed a man on the moon, sequenced the human genome, put a rover on Mars and developed self-driving cars. Why do we still have rebuffering in 2022? Content owners blame the CDN and the player, the CDN blames the content owner and the player, and the player blames the CDN and the content owner. Let’s stop the blame game – and have a mutual look at the data!

We have analyzed massive amounts of data over a time period of more than 2 months. For each day, we have analyzed 15 billion client-to-edge requests for more than 10 million streaming sessions per day. We’ve focused on a VOD, multi-CDN setup with ad-insertion. Based on a combination of client-side quality of experience data (by Common Media Client Data) and server-side quality of service data, we have classified buffer starvation events. We categorize them into buckets, for where they could be prevented – 1) at the player, 2) at the last mile, 3) at the CDN/Origin or 4) at the workflow level. Leveraging the learnings from this unique data set enables us to significantly reduce end-users’ rebuffering by taking advantage of the interplay of the player, the CDN and of the workflow. A content owner, a cdn and a player walk into a bar, and the user has a great streaming experience. Mission accomplished. This talk was presented at Demuxed ’22, a conference for video nerds in San Francisco featuring amazing talks like this one. Demuxed ’22 was made possible by sponsors like our Platinum sponsor Daily (https://daily.co) and organized by people from Mux (https://mux.com). For more information about the conference and community, see https://2022.demuxed.com.