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Short videos have recently emerged as a popular form of short- duration User Generated Content (UGC) within modern social me- dia. Short video content is generally less than a minute long and predominantly produced in vertical orientation on smartphones. While still fundamentally being streaming, short video delivery is distinctly characterized by the deployment of a mechanism that pre-loads ahead of user request. Background pre-loading aims to eliminate start-up time, which is now prioritized higher in Quality of Experience (QoE) objectives, given that the application design facilitates instant ‘swiping’ to the next video in a recommended sequence. In this work, we provide a comprehensive comparison of four popular short video services. In particular, we explore content characteristics and evaluate the video quality across resolutions for each service. We next characterize the pre-loading policy adopted by each service. Last, we conduct an experimental study to investi- gate data consumption and evaluate achieved QoE under different network scenarios and application configurations. 

WiFi has emerged as a pivotal technology for delivering Quality of Experience (QoE) to mobile devices. Unfortunately, exploding numbers of competing devices, potential encroachment by cellular technology, and dramatic increases in content richness deliver a more variable QoE than desired. Moreover, such variance tends to occur both across time and space making it a difficult problem to debug. Existing active approaches tend to be expensive or impractical while existing passive approaches tend to suffer from accuracy issues. In our paper, we propose a novel passive client-side approach that provides an efficient and accurate characterization by taking advantage of the properties of Frame Aggregation (FA) and Block Acknowledgements (BA). We show in the paper that one can accurately derive important metrics such as airtime and throughput with only a minimal amount of observed BAs. We show through extensive experiments the validity of our approach and conduct validation studies in the dense environment of a campus tailgate.