YouSlow : What Influences User Abandonment Behavior for Internet Video ?

With the proliferation of online video, measuring quality of experience (QoE) has become a crucial aspect for the analysis of today’s over-the-top (OTT) video streaming. To monitor video QoE, we introduce YouSlow, a monitoring tool that can detect various playback events (e.g., start-up delay, rebufferings and bitrate changes) from video players while a video is being played. Using YouSlow, we have collected more than 1,400,000 YouTube views from more than 110 countries. We measured the impact of these playback events on video abandonment and found that about 10% of viewers abandoned YouTube videos when the pre-roll ads lasted for 15 seconds. We observe that more viewers abandoned YouTube videos when they suffered from the initial buffering than the rebufferings in the middle of a playback. Our regression analysis shows that bitrate changes do not affect video abandonment significantly and the abandonment rate can be estimated accurately using the rebuffering ratio and the number of rebufferings (R2 = 0.94).