Capturing Video Stream Audience Over IP Networks

In recent years, the transmission of audiovisual content presented substantial growth in the context of ondemand delivery, made possible through networks based on Internet Protocol, IP. This increase, boosted by internet access omnipresence and new consumption habits of this content, makes this category of communication to be continuously rivaled with traditional broadcasting technologies of Television (TV) signals. Thus, developing techniques to assess the efficacy and risks that the use of IP networks for this purpose imposes becomes relevant. Moreover, while for the named Broadcast TV has technical mechanisms that ensure the quality of this communication are well established, the same does not occur for video stream over IP, or IP Stream. The reason for this is that, for one of them, its technology is equipped with quality guarantees based on a circuit-switching operation in a connection-oriented systematic. While the other, once the web is considered, is unable to ensure quality due to its packetswitching architecture. And this is what sets it as a model called 'best effort' which, besides the features to allow channel sharing and systems interconnection, enables precisely what makes its increase in its use for audiovisual transmission, the applicationoriented provision. Thereby attending the consumer’s desire for on demand content, subsequently amplifies the role of what and who is on the edge, ultimately placing the user as protagonist. In this IP scenario, it is underlined the lack of mechanisms, related to the Internet, capable of recording two technical parameters that influence the commercial chain that sustains this entire ecosystem, they are: availability and audience. Keeping this in mind and with the goal of evaluating this new method for audiovisual offering, this work has developed methodologies to acquire such information at this consumption edge. And this has been accomplished through the construction of a software tool. It was implemented as an extension to one of the most used browsers, Google Chrome, to capture the audience of Internet videos on the leading supplier of videos exists today, Google's YouTube. In this work, the abstractions of considerations around the Quality of Service (QoS) concept, is proposed to be interpreted as a measure of Quality of Experience (QoE) assimilated from time viewed compared against the total time of a video. This justification is founded on the concept that quality translates into a particular subjectivity for each user and their individual expectations, so a measure of time is shown to be an effective thermometer. This effectiveness is justified by a principle consolidated within TV broadcast for decades, audience measurement. Thus, the construction of something analogous to the 'People's meter' in a similar scheme of 'Television Rating Points', TRP, running to capture of information in order to convey assertiveness to all stakeholders involved in this new delivery method. Keywords— IP Stream, Audience, Connection Availability, Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE), Software Development.