What is it about?
When people watch online videos, they often skip ahead or jump back instead of watching from start to finish. But when they jump to a part that has not loaded yet, the video usually pauses and buffers. In this paper, we present a new video streaming method called StallFreeSeek that makes this kind of skipping much smoother. Instead of trying to load everything in advance, it preloads just enough of many future parts of the video to let playback start quickly, then loads the rest while the video continues playing. This reduces waiting time when viewers skip around, improves the overall viewing experience, and avoids wasting as much data on video that people never watch. In our tests, it reduced seek-related stall time by 79%, improved quality of experience, and reduced buffer waste by 44%
Featured Image
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Online video systems are designed mainly for people who watch straight through, but many viewers actually skip ahead or jump back. That is when buffering delays often happen. This paper shows that those pauses can be greatly reduced by redesigning how video is chunked and prefetched for modern high-bandwidth, low-latency networks. The approach is timely because better broadband, fiber, 5G, and CDN deployment make these network conditions increasingly common, and it is practical because it improves seeking without increasing buffer waste.
Perspectives
Working on this paper made me think differently about video streaming. A lot of systems are designed around the idea that people watch from beginning to end, but that is often not how people actually use video. I enjoyed exploring how improving network conditions could be used not just for higher bitrate, but for a smoother and more responsive viewing experience. I also really valued the user study, because it kept the project connected to real user experience and made me think about how smoother seeking can help people who use video to learn by making it easier to revisit specific parts. For me, one of the most rewarding parts of this work was showing that seek-related stalls are not simply something viewers have to accept.
Jiayu Zhu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: StallFreeSeek: Exploiting Better Network Conditions to Improve Video Seek Experience, Proceedings of the ACM on Networking, March 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3786291.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
