Video Genetics: A Case Study from YouTube

We explore in a single but large case study how videos within YouTube, competing for view counts, are like organisms within an ecology, competing for survival. We develop this analogy, whose core idea shows that short video clips, best detected across videos as near-duplicate keyframes, behave similarly to genes. We report work in progress, on a dataset of 5.4K videos with 210K keyframes on a single topic, which traces sequences, not bags, of “near-dups ” over time, both within videos and across them. We demonstrate their utility to: cleanse responses to queries contaminated by over-eager YouTube query expansion; separate videos temporally ac-cording to their responses to external events; track the evolu-tion and lifespan of continuing video“stories”; automatically locate video summaries already present within a video ecol