Co-written by: Mark Greve, Engineering Manager at Akamai. Part of the Media Client Team  \r\n \r\n The first part of this blog series discussed the quality of user experience (QoE) metrics and two strategies that heavily influence the QoE: the bitrate selection strategy and the buffering strategy. In this second part, we’ll discuss ExoPlayer's buffering strategy and how to configure it to reduce the startup time and video on-demand (VOD) content rebuffering. \r\n ExoPlayer buffering strategy \r\n In this blog, we investigate ExoPlayer Version 2.9.6. Classes implementing the LoadControl interface define the buffering strategy of ExoPlayer. Buffering strategy answers questions like: \r\n \r\n Do we need to load more media data? \r\n \r\n Do we have enough media data to start playback? \r\n \r\n \r\n The buffering strategy is not responsible for managing the buffers or downloading media data (that's the MediaSource), or playback of media data (that's the Renderer).…