What Facebook learned from focusing on improving video playback in India When our team set out to improve the video playback experience for Facebook users accessing our service in India, we looked broadly at the issues that mattered most to users and set off to fix those issues. In this talk, I’ll discuss our approach to identifying problems, defining success metrics, and improving our infrastructure across the networking stack, our video encodings, and video players. While we focused on solutions that would have the highest impact for users in India, many of these changes improved playback performance for our users worldwide. The first step was to understand the state of the video playback experience in India. To do this, we leveraged a tool that allows us to root cause stalls from client to the CDN and quantify the opportunity size of various changes. We paired this data analysis with on the ground user research. We sent researchers and engineers to India to meet with users to observe how they consumed video on their devices. Based on our analysis and research, we identified the top areas to invest in and targeted metrics to track success. On the network side, we saw meaningful improvements from enabling QUIC in our mobile apps. On the encoding side, we drove improvements by improving coverage of low bitrate lanes and by improving compression efficiency. On the playback side, we made improvements to our ABR logic and improved cache eviction logic and reduced internal network congestion. Our work here is not complete, but we’ve made meaningful progress towards making Facebook videos perform well for users on all devices and networks. Presented at Demuxed 2020.