Longitudinal characterisation and comparative analysis of differently themed video streaming sites

Abstract

The internet has been redefined by video content on user-generated content (UGC) services, whether in entertainment or business. Many video streaming services have embraced this change to form websites by combining features similar to YouTube and other social media online services. This paper provides a comprehensive measurement study of three of the most popular video streaming websites with social media features today - ‘TED Talks’, ‘xHamster’ and ‘XVideos’. We have conducted an analysis of 2,685 TED videos from 2006-2018 to characterise the service. For xHamster and XVideos, active measurements were used to collect unique metadata on almost 3,405 and 6,721 channels from 2012-2019 respectively, which were then analysed. Through these characterisations we gained insight into the main players of the websites – viewers, uploaders and website owners. Our analysis involved the studying of video streaming characteristics such as views, duration, number of uploads, ratings, tags etc. By this we aim to give an overview of the services’ current state and compare them with other traditional video streaming services. Our results showed some similar trends to be observed in all three websites such as TED videos and adult channels getting high number of views despite low injection rate, maintaining a power-law behaviour due to front page recommendations and ratings being underutilized as a feature. We also noticed two different type of tagging systems being used. Other observations include TED Talks videos being much longer in length than videos on other traditional streaming services and adult streaming services having higher number of subscribers per channel. The characterisation results obtained are of value to network operators, content providers, and protocol designers. These results can be used by network operators to plan for better resource allocations, and help protocol designers to improve video streaming in the future. Content providers of popular websites also want to improve the quality of their video streaming services with reduced operational costs. Our study provides a glimpse at how video streaming services function today and the trends they seem to follow.