Characterisation and comparative analysis of thematic video portals

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive measurement study on three video streaming websites with social media features - ‘TED Talks’, ‘xHamster’ and ‘XVideos’. We have analysed 2685 TED videos from 2006 to 2018 to characterise the service. For xHamster and XVideos, active measurements were used to collect unique metadata on almost 3405 and 6721 channels from 2012 to 2019 respectively, which were then analysed. Through these characterisations we gained insight into the main players of the websites – viewers, uploaders and website owners. Our analysis involved the studying of video streaming characteristics such as views, number of uploads, ratings, tags etc. By this we aim to give an overview of the services' current state and compare them with other traditional video streaming services. Our results showed some similar trends to be observed in all three websites such as TED videos and adult channels getting a high number of views despite low injection rate, maintaining a power-law behaviour due to front page recommendations and ratings being underutilised as a feature.Other observations include adult streaming services having a higher number of subscribers per channel. The characterisation results obtained are of value to network operators, content providers, and protocol designers. These results can also be used by content providers to measure what type of content is being watched on their websites. Our study provides a glimpse at how video streaming services function today and the trends they seem to follow.