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An Evaluation of a Nationwide TV Service

Karthikeyan, Vidhyalakshmi; (2019) An Evaluation of a Nationwide TV Service. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Green open access

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Abstract

This thesis is an empirical investigation of the nationwide BT TV delivery service to understand a complex ecosystem of customer behaviour and service performance. Content consumption, capacity bottlenecks, content generation, end-to-end performance and service quality benchmarking were chosen as five key aspects of TV delivery. The first results chapter explores on-demand content consumption patterns. The author finds that customers tend to watch older content on weekends and newer content on weekdays. Up to 56% of viewers in a fifteen-minute peak time interval also converge to view the top 10 most popular items. The second results chapter presents observed peak concurrent network capacity demand across BTs UK estate. An analysis of content generation at the headend quantifies bandwidth benefits from deploying variable bitrate. Bandwidth gains of 16-17% can be expected when 30+ channels are concurrently received in busy exchanges. The number of provisioned customers at an exchange is the single most explanatory factor for its peak concurrent demand. A method of capacity planning using clustering of daily patterns is proposed. The third result chapter evaluates end-to-end packet loss and identifies drivers such as home hub type, set-top-box model and time of day. The fourth results chapter proposes a method to rank four loss-related impairments by their impact on long-term viewing engagement across multiple delivery technologies and viewer expectations. Live content viewers continue watching a programme despite buffering but watch less than expected in the long term with increasing errors. Buffering in app VoD content results in session abandonment. The final results chapter presents a peergroup-based method to benchmark TV quality of service to identify customers for proactive diagnostics. Viewing duration and downstream line rate are the two best cohorting variables to benchmark multicast packet loss performance. Key insights and existing literature are combined to recommend improvements to future BT TV delivery.

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification: Ph.D
Title: An Evaluation of a Nationwide TV Service
Event: UCL (University College London)
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author 2019. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10077346
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