The increasing amount of internet traffic from video streaming services, in addition to users requesting more personalized content and creating/sharing video content, has led to a huge demand for highly scalable and efficient distribution of video content, especially with mobile computing devices. Embodiments provide a network and service infrastructure better suited to these video content distribution and mobility needs. More intelligence is provided in the network infrastructure through an awareness of the user status/activity, end-user device, and content characteristics in correlation with the network bandwidth conditions. In this view of adding more intelligence in the network, additional communication is utilized between the service platform and the network to identify content characteristics (e.g., video content, content encoding characteristics), network characteristics, and device characteristics.