Will They or Won't They?: Toward Effective Prediction of Watch Behavior for Time-Shifted Edge-Caching of Netflix Series Videos

Internet traffic load is not uniformly distributed through the day; it is significantly higher during peak-periods, and comparatively idle during off-peak periods. In this context, we present CacheFlix, a time-shifted edge-caching solution that prefetches Netflix content during off-peak periods of network connectivity. We specifically focus on Netflix since it contributes to the largest percentage of global Internet traffic by a single application. We analyze a real-world dataset of Netflix viewing activity that we collected from 1060 users spanning a 1-year period and comprised of over 2.2 million Netflix TV shows and documentary series; we restrict the scope of our study to Netflix series that account for 65% of a typical user's Netflix load in terms of bytes fetched. We present insights on users' viewing behavior, and develop an accurate and efficient prediction algorithm using LSTM networks that caches episodes of Netflix series on storage constrained edge nodes, based on the user's past viewing activity. We evaluate CacheFlix on the collected dataset over various cache eviction policies, and find that CacheFlix is able to shift 70% of Netflix series traffic to off-peak hours.