Video requests from Online Social Networks: Characterization, analysis and generation

Abstract

Abstract-The deep penetration of Online Social Networks (OSNs) have made them major portals for video content sharing. It is known that a significant portion of the accesses to video sharing sites are now coming from OSN users. Yet the unique features of video sharing over OSNs and their impact remain largely unknown. In this paper, we present a measurement study towards understanding the video requests from OSNs. We closely collaborated with a large-scale Facebook-like OSN to analyze its user access logs spanning over four months. Our measurement reveals a number of distinctive features on the popularity distribution of videos shared over the OSN. In particular, we observe that the OSN amplifies the skewness of video popularity so largely that about 2% most popular videos account for 90% of total views; the video requests distribution also exhibits perfect powerlaw feature; video popularity evolution shows more dynamics. All these noticeably differ from that of conventional videos, such as YouTube videos. To further understand the characteristics, we model the video viewing and sharing behaviors in OSNs, leading to the development of a practical emulator. It reveals the gap between the sharing rate and the viewing rate, and generates user requests that well capture the video popularity distribution and dynamics as observed in our empirical data.

The potential of social-aware multimedia prefetching on mobile devices

“…Another explanation would be that the users very much consume videos shortly after being published. This theory can be supported by findings of Li et al [7]. The researchers reported, that the average lifetime of a video in OSNs is very limited.…”

“…Previous studies [7] show a significant impact of popularity of content on its consumption. Content on video sharing sites follows a so called zipf-like distribution in which a large proportion of the videos is watched only by a very small amount of users, whereas the top percent has high access rates.…”

“…Li et al [7] add insights on video dissemination in OSNs and identify very short life times of videos with low popularity. The resulting SocialTube [8] system demonstrates the efficiency of a peer-to-peer-based social network that is driven by social relationships and less by interests.…”

Wireless Networks and Matching Theory

“…In other words, a user is more likely to request a video, shared by one of his friends, if this user is used to watch the shared videos by that friend [21,22]. In other words, a user is more likely to request a video, shared by one of his friends, if this user is used to watch the shared videos by that friend [21,22].…”

Understanding Video Sharing Propagation in Social Networks

“…Instead of making a comprehensive measurement and analysis as we do in our article, they focused on the system optimization based on these new traffic patterns. Our recent works [Li et al 2012b;2013b] also studied the characteristics of videos in the RenRen SNS, but propagation patterns have yet to be closely examined.…”