A first look at performance of TV streaming sticks

Recent measurements show that more than half of the peak time Internet traffic is due to video streaming. Recent trends also suggest that consumers are increasingly receiving their TV content over the Internet via streaming appliances that are connected to the TV. We present the first systematic measurement study of a popular class of such devices that have the 'stick' form factor. The study covers streaming and network related performance using a widely used content server on the Internet (Netflix) and a local instrumented media server. On the user-end, we use three widely available mediasticks in the US - Chromecast , Amazon Fire and Roku. We observe that there are significant performance differentials across the streaming sticks. Our experiments show that Amazon Fire and Chromecast provide better user experience in the presence of varying network conditions, whereas Roku performs best at high stable bandwidth.