One of the major challenges in live streaming is the scarcity of real-world events to test innovative ideas and algorithms, such as adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms. Relying on actual live events for testing not only prolongs the innovation cycle but also increases the risk of negatively impacting user experience.

To overcome this obstacle, we at Netflix have enhanced our existing client simulator to emulate live streaming scenarios. This simulator utilizes network traces and device characteristics gathered from real-world sessions to drive our production client library. We will delve into the specifics of how this simulator operates during our presentation. In summary, the client simulator plays a crucial role in driving innovation at Netflix, which we will explore in detail during our presentation. In this talk, we will first present how the client simulator simulates live streaming. Then we will demonstrate how it can be used to test new live encoding methods, like Variable Bitrate (VBR) encoding, and to evaluate various ABR algorithms on a large scale. We will conclude the talk with future directions. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2024, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this in San Francisco. Learn more at https://demuxed.com