Delivering videos under less-than-ideal network conditions without compromising end-users' quality of experiences is a hard problem. Virtually all prior work follow a piecemeal approach---either "tweaking" the fully reliable transport layer or making the client "smarter." We propose VOXEL, a cross-layer optimization system for video streaming. We use VOXEL to demonstrate how to combine application-provided "insights" with a partially reliable protocol for optimizing video streaming. To this end, we present a novel ABR algorithm that explicitly trades off losses for improving end-users' video-watching experiences.