On the Understanding of Video Streaming Viewing Behaviors Across Different Content Providers

Watching videos online has become prevalent in our daily activities. While there are extensive measurements studying about video on demand, IPTV, live streaming, etc., most of them focus their analysis on a single content provider (CP). Various user behaviors over multiple different CPs are yet to be explored. In this paper, we collect about ten million viewing records of the six most popular video CPs through a major Internet service provider (ISP) in Shanghai, China, and examine the user behaviors and access patterns with an emphasis on comparing them among different CPs in the same environments. Our analysis reveals the day-scale temporal patterns, the diversified device-wise preferences, and the city-scale geographical features of the different CPs, and identifies the high relevance between the user behaviors and the contents of the videos. Moreover, we find that user migration across multiple CPs is prevalent and highly influenced by different features of CPs. We believe that our observations and findings can provide valuable insights for CPs to enhance their user experience as well as ISPs to optimize the network architecture.