Mobile Live Streaming: Insights from the Periscope Service

Live video streaming from mobile devices is quickly becoming popular through services such as Periscope, Meerkat, and Facebook Live. Little is known, however, about how such services tackle the challenges of the live mobile streaming scenario. This work addresses such gap by investigating in details the characteristics of the Periscope service. A large number of publicly available streams have been captured and analyzed in depth, in particular studying the characteristics of the encoded streams and the communication evolution over time. Such an investigation allows to get an insight into key performance parameters such as bandwidth, latency, buffer levels and freezes, as well as the limits and strategies adopted by Periscope to deal with this challenging application scenario.