<title>Characterizing user access to videos on the World Wide Web</title>

Abstract

Despite evidence of rising popularity of video on the web (or VOW), little is known about how users access video. However, such a characterization can greatly benefit the design of multimedia systems such as web video proxies and VOW servers. Hence, this paper presents an analysis of trace data obtained from an ongoing VOW experiment in Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. This experiment is unique as video material is distributed over a high bandwidth network allowing users to make access decisions without the network being a major factor. Our analysis revealed a number of interesting discoveries regarding user VOW access. For example, accesses display high temporal locality: several requests for the same video title often occur within a short time span. Accesses also exhibited spatial locality of reference whereby a small number of machines accounted for a large number of overall requests. Another finding was a browsing pattern where users preview the initial portion of a video to find out if they are interested. If they like it, they continue watching, otherwise they halt it. This pattern suggests that caching the first several minutes of video data should prove effective. Lastly, the analysis shows that, contrary to previous studies, rankings of video titles by popularity did not fit a Zipfian distribution.

Geographical Characterization of YouTube: a Latin American View

“…Acharya et al [3] characterized user access to video objects on the Web and found that half of the requests were for a partial access of the object, indicating early stoppage of transfers by users. Costa et al [11] analyzed workloads from two media servers.…”

Internal popularity of streaming video and its implication on caching

“…Acharya et al [4] presented some basic properties on the internal popularity distribution of streaming media. They found that not all of the requests for streaming media completed the playback.…”

“…There exists extensive research in the area of streaming media workload [4] [5] [6] because of its significance on proxy caching, multicast delivery and network management etc. However, relatively few of these studies are on modeling the internal popularity distribution.…”

An interactive video delivery and caching system using video summarization

“…These problems and limitations have considerably affected user viewing experience and wasted network resources. A recent study [2] reports that almost half of the video requests stopped during near the beginning of the playback. This result indicates that an improved video delivery scheme needs to be developed to manage the user video browsing behavior.…”