In today's hyper-connected world, rich social data feeds can be obtained from various sources, including the data exhaust of many commonly used systems. In this paper, we analyze the social pulse, obtained from viewer activity in an IPTV network-we attempt to validate a framework for determining public opinion and public interest through implicit feedback of IPTV viewers. First, we address the hypothesis that implicit viewer feedback in the form of channel change events, paired with the content metadata, can be used to model viewers' opinion and interest. For this, we design a controlled experiment to collect explicit feedback by rating a set of general-interest news clips. In addition to collecting demographic information, we also survey viewers' opinion, interest, and the probability of channel change during each clip. Furthermore, we extract weighted feature vectors from the closed captions of the video; this data, combined with the reported probability of channel change, is used to build a model that classifies opinion in five categories based on the probability of channel change and content. Next, we build a simplified model that classifies opinion in five categories based on the interest, which shows a linear relationship, but further consideration of content, in this case, provides better accuracy and possibility to analyze anomalous cases. Finally, we discuss and analyze the applications of such models in large systems and the necessary modifications to scale the system and to ensure the adequate performance on massive IPTV event data streams. INDEX TERMS Implicit user feedback, opinion modeling, interest modeling, viewership profiling, IPTV.
IPTV has been widely deployed throughout the world, bringing significant advantages to users in terms of the channel offering, video on demand, and interactive applications. One aspect that has been often neglected is the ability of precise and unobtrusive telemetry. TV set-top boxes that are deployed in modern IPTV systems can be thought of as capable sensor nodes that collect vast amounts of data, representing both the user activity and the quality of service delivered by the system itself. In this paper we focus on the user-generated events and analyze how the data stream of channel change events received from the entire IPTV network can be mined to obtain insight about the content. We demonstrate that it is possible to predict the occurrence of TV ads with high probability and show that the approach could be extended to model the user behavior and classify the viewership in multiple dimensions.
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