Commercial Streaming Services Research Articles

Streaming media business strategies and audience-centered practices: a comparative study of Netflix and Tencent Video

Abstract Purpose This comparative study of streaming services in different cultural and economic contexts shows how they optimize the user experience by improving recommendation algorithms, upgrading infrastructure, and developing global services, in responding to the crisis of losing subscribers. Method We use analysis of industry documents to demonstrate how different approaches to streaming video business value user-generated data and reconstruction practices. Findings There is already a similar trend among global streaming platforms to create a pan-media entertainment & cultural service by increasing revenue streams and merchandise offering categories, as well as keeping subscriptions and attracting more viewers in the long run. Practical implications The study displays how streaming platforms with SVOD, AVOD, and Mix-funded modes are changing their business strategies in the current hyperinflationary and increasingly competitive media market, updating how they create user-centered practices in search of ultimate commercial success. Social implications It also illustrates how different commercial streaming service formats end up with similar solutions to the challenges. Originality/value The study is a comparative analysis of the streaming phenomenon as it happens in real-time, complementing the observation and evaluation of the latest updates in the streaming industry and predicting the future trends of global brands in the digital ecosystem under different commercial and cultural logics.

Mapping audiovisual content providers and resources in Greece

In Greece, there are many audiovisual resources available on the Internet that interest scientists and the general public. Although freely available, finding such resources often becomes a challenging task, because they are hosted on scattered websites and in different types/formats. These websites usually offer limited search options; at the same time, there is no aggregation service for audiovisual resources, nor a national registry for such content. To meet this need, the Open AudioVisual Archives project was launched and the first step in its development is to create a dataset with open access audiovisual material. The current research creates such a dataset by applying specific selection criteria in terms of copyright and content, form/use and process/technical characteristics. The results reported in this paper show that libraries, archives, museums, universities, mass media organizations, governmental and non-governmental organizations are the main types of providers, but the vast majority of resources are open courses offered by universities under the “Creative Commons” license. Providers have significant differences in terms of their collection management capabilities. Most of them do not own any kind of publishing infrastructure and use commercial streaming services, such as YouTube. In terms of metadata policy, most of the providers use application profiles instead of international metadata schemas.

From the extraordinary to the everyday: discourses on American quality serial television in Sweden’s leading newspapers and the breakthrough of streaming TV

ABSTRACT This essay explores discourses on American quality serial television in Sweden’s leading newspapers, and how a gradual discursive repositioning of quality TV – from the extraordinary to the everyday – is linked to Swedish television’s transition into a screen culture increasingly dominated by commercial streaming services. The analysis of the newspaper material shows that the campaign to legitimate quality serial television as respectable art subsided after 2012, to give way to a wider set of conceptualizations of the program form and its role in Swedish television culture. Although the newspaper press includes a range of perspectives, from celebratory approaches to on-demand culture to concerns over audience atomization and diminishing artistic distinction, it is also possible to discern a more general reversal of terms – from originality to sameness, from scarcity to plentitude, and from distinction to mediocrity – that discursively relocates American quality serial TV from the sphere of extraordinary art to the sphere of everyday commercial mass culture. This discursive shift reflects a redefined field for cultural criticism, but also reads as an index of a transformation of television culture in Sweden in the wake of the breakthrough of commercial streaming around 2012.

University Music Students’ Choice of Music Listening Sources: Use of Library Resources as Compared with Non-Academic Streaming Services

ABSTRACT The rise of streaming services and decline of analog media have affected academic music libraries in their traditional role as a resource of listening materials. This study examines the listening-source preferences of college-level music students across multiple institutions through a survey in which students compared electronic commercial streaming services and both electronic and analog library multimedia collections to determine the factors that lead to the use of one source over the other. Findings indicate a strong preference for commercial streaming services over library materials, emphasizing the importance of convenience. However, the perceived quality of library materials remains high among participants.

Computational phonogram archiving

A general approach to analyzing audio files makes it possible to re-create the sound of ancient instruments, identify cross-cultural musical properties, and more.

Provincializing Spotify: Radio, algorithms and conviviality

Focusing on early experiments with algorithms and music streaming at WFMU, the longest-running US freeform radio station, and the Free Music Archive (FMA), a curated open music website, this article shows how commercial streaming services have been indebted to independent, open music infrastructures but have then erased and denied that history. The article ‘provincializes’ music streaming platforms such as Spotify by focusing not on their commercial aims but instead on the ‘convivial’, collaborative practices and spaces that their software engineers and users inhabited. I analyse an experimental national telephone broadcasting service at WFMU in 1989, an algorithmic WFMU radio stream ‘The Flaming Robot of Love’ during the Republican National Convention in 2004 and the ‘Free Music Archive Radio App’ that recommended tracks on the FMA website from 2011 to 2016. The app worked with an application programming interface (API) from Echo Nest. Echo Nests’ algorithmic recommendation engine also powers most commercial streaming services today. When Spotify purchased Echo Nest in 2014 and took the start-up’s open API offline in 2016, it engaged in ‘primitive accumulation’ of open-access knowledge and resources for commercial purposes. The FMA closed in 2019 and now only exists as a static site. As social institutions, however, WFMU and FMA ‘recomposed’ – adapted to a new medium and a new political context – collaborative engineering practices of the early broadcasting era. The article argues that moments of oppositional ‘conviviality’ in media culture such as the FMA should be analysed as elements of a continuous struggle.

Adaptive Chunklets and AQM for Higher-Performance Content Streaming

Commercial streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube use proprietary HTTP-based adaptive streaming (HAS) techniques to deliver content to consumers worldwide. MPEG recently developed Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) as a unifying standard for HAS-based streaming. In DASH systems, streaming clients employ adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms to maximise user Quality of Experience (QoE) under variable network conditions. In a typical Internet-enabled home, video streams have to compete with diverse application flows for the last-mile Internet Service Provider (ISP) bottleneck capacity. Under such circumstances, ABR algorithms will only act upon the fraction of the network capacity that is available, leading to possible QoE degradation. We have previously explored chunklets as an approach orthogonal to ABR algorithms, which uses parallel connections for intra-video chunk retrieval. Chunklets effectively make more bandwidth available for ABR algorithms in the presence of cross-traffic, especially in environments where Active Queue Management (AQM) schemes such as Proportional Integral controller Enhanced (PIE) and FlowQueue-Controlled Delay (FQ-CoDel) are deployed. However, chunklets consume valuable server/middlebox resources which typically handle hundreds of thousands of requests/connections per second. In this article, we propose ‘adaptive chunklets’ -- a novel chunklet enhancement that dynamically tunes the number of concurrent connections. We demonstrate that the combination of adaptive chunklets and FQ-CoDel is the most effective strategy. Our experiments show that adaptive chunklets can reduce the number of connections by almost 30% and consume almost 8% less bandwidth than fixed chunklets while providing the same QoE.