Watching Videos from Everywhere: a Study of the PPTV Mobile VoD System

International audienceIn this paper, we examine mobile users' behavior and their corresponding video viewing patterns from logs extracted from the servers of a large scale VoD system. We focus on the analysis of the main discrepancies that might exist when users access the VoD system catalog from WiFi or 3G connections. We also study factors that might impact mobile users' interests and video popularity. The users' behavior exhibits strong daily and weekly patterns, with mobile users' interests being surprisingly spread across almost all categories and video lengths, independently of the connection type. However, by examining the activity of users individually, we observed a concentration of interests and peculiar access patterns, which allows to classify the users and thus better predict their behavior. We also nd the skewed video popularity distribution and demonstrate that the popularity of a video can be predicted using its very early popularity level. We then analyzed the sources of video viewing and found that even if search engines are the dominant sources for a majority of videos, they represent less than 10% (resp. 20%) of the sources for the highly popular videos in 3G (resp. WiFi) network. We also report that both the type of connection and the type of mobile device used have an impact on the viewing time and the source of viewing. Using our ndings, we provide insights and recommendations that can be used to design intelligent mobile VoD systems and help in improving personalized services on these platforms