Online Media Services Research Articles

Behavioral shift of generation X towards OTT during Covid’19 in India

Over-the-top (OTT) services such as Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, Zee5, etc., have changed consumers’ content consumption behavior. Globalization and Digitalization have encouraged consumers to have limitless access to the Internet for information, leisure, entertainment, and social interconnectedness. The increase in the availability of high-speed Internet, the latest smartphones, and breakthroughs in technology have created great opportunities for the OTT sector, with people preferring to consume content on-the-go digitally rather than traditional media services, such as cable television. The Covid’19 pandemic has seen an increase in viewership’s and subscriptions towards these streaming platforms, with people of different age groups adapting to changing viewership trends. This study aims to understand Generation X’s behavioral shift (Age 41 to 55) towards OTT during Covid’19 in India. The literature review talks about the Generation X cohort of consumers, their behavioral habits, and attitudes towards technology. It also discusses the changing trends of online content consumption and how Covid’19 has created a spark in viewership’s towards India’s online media services. The research study aims to perform explanatory research to establish a relationship between the increase in consumption and subscriptions of OTT services in India by Generation X and the impact of Covid’19 on the same. Data will be collected from consumer’s age amongst 41 to 55 in India via survey questionnaires, and linear regression tests will be performed to test the hypotheses and establish a correlation between the dependent and independent variables.

Young Adults' Responses to an African and US-Based COVID-19 Edutainment Miniseries: Real-Time Qualitative Analysis of Online Social Media Engagement.

BackgroundIn April 2020, as cases of the novel COVID-19 spread across the globe, MTV Staying Alive Foundation created the educational entertainment miniseries MTV Shuga: Alone Together. In 70 short episodes released daily on YouTube, Alone Together aimed to disseminate timely and accurate information to increase young people’s knowledge, motivation, and actions to prevent COVID-19.ObjectiveWe sought to identify Alone Together viewer’s perspectives on the global COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdowns by examining the words, conversations, experiences, and emotions expressed on social media in response to the Alone Together episodes. We also assessed how viewers used the series and its online community as a source of support during the global pandemic.MethodsA total of 3982 comments and 70 live chat conversations were extracted from YouTube between April and October 2020 and analyzed through a data-led inductive thematic approach. Aggregated demographic and geographical data were collected using YouTube Analytics.ResultsThe miniseries had a global reach across 5 continents, with a total of 7.7 million views across MTV Shuga platforms. The series had over 1 million views over 70 episodes on YouTube and an average of 5683 unique viewers per episode on YouTube. The dominant audience was adults under the age of 35 years and women. Across diverse countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, the United States, and the UK, viewers believed that COVID-19 was serious and expressed that it was socially responsible to follow public health measures. Storylines of the series about the impact of self-isolation on mental health, exposure to violence in lockdowns, and restricted employment opportunities due to the pandemic resonated with young viewers. Tuning in to the miniseries provided viewers with reliable information, entertainment, and an online community during an isolating, confusing, and worrying time.ConclusionsDuring the first wave of COVID-19, viewers from at least 53 countries connected on social media via the MTV miniseries. The analysis showed how digitally connected people under the age of 35 years, predominantly women, felt compelled to follow COVID-19 safety measures despite the pandemic’s impact on their social, educational, and financial needs. Viewers used social media to reach out to fellow viewers for advice, solace, support, and resources. Organizations, governments, and individuals have been forced to innovate during the pandemic to ensure people can access services safely and remotely. This analysis showed that women under 35 years of age were especially receptive to receiving support from online communities and media services. Peer influence and support online can be a powerful public health tool as people have a great capacity to influence each other and shape norms around public health. However, online services are not accessible to everyone, and COVID-19 has increased disparities between digitally connected and unconnected younger adults.

Reading Comprehension Skills: The Effect of Online Flipped Classroom Learning and Student Engagement During the COVID-19 Pandemic

<p style="text-align:justify">The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak in the Indonesians nowadays, the public education department established the policy of the online education system to all education levels. Most educators employ an online flipped learning method to support the policy. Research aimed to measure the effect of online based-flipped classroom learning between using Microsoft Team and WhatsApp and student engagement on reading comprehension skills. The research approach was a quasi-experimental model with a 2 x 3 factorial pre-test-post-test non-equivalent control group design. The sample of this investigation was early period undergraduates of the management economics study program. Data analysis employed a two-way ANOVA test. The result confirmed that the online flipped learning scheme using Microsoft Team was better than WhatsApp in improving student engagement and reading comprehension skills. We advise English lecturers to apply better online media services, pay attention to the completeness of the learning features and train their competence in implementing distance learning to use compatible synchronous flipped classroom teaching based on internet technologies.</p>

The effectiveness of the PLN website application as a communication media and services for customers during the pandemic period in Pangkalpinang city

PT. PLN (Persero) as one of the state-owned enterprises (BUMN) received a mandate from the Indonesian government to provide electricity services and COVID-19 stimulus assistance to people affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to social distancing policy during current pandemic, PT. PLN (Persero) should provide alternative online media services, such as the PT PLN (Persero) website application to meet all the electricity needs of customers and distribute electricity payment stimulus assistance. Therefore, it was interesting to study the effectiveness of the PT. PLN (Persero) website application as a communication media and services during the pandemic period in Pangkalpinang city. This study used four established variables to assessthe quality of e-service, namely efficiency, fulfillment, service availability, and privacy. The method used in this research was a quantitative method with a questionnaire approach. The number of samples was 399 respondents. The sampling method was purposive sampling with the criteria of respondents was the user of the PT PLN (Persero) website application. Based on the analysis of survey questionnaire results, observation, and other supporting data, it was concluded that PT. PLN (Persero) website application for customers during the pandemic in Pangkalpinang city is significantly effective as it had fulfilled all the variables mentioned above.

Let Me Entertain You? The Importance of Authenticity in Online Customer Engagement

Should all brands initiate online customer engagement activities to entertain consumers beyond informing them? This work presents the idea that (in)consistency between the nature of an engagement initiative (i.e., entertaining or informative) and the perception of the brand (i.e., warm versus competent) influences the extent to which consumers perceive the initiative to be authentic. This in turn influences consumers' evaluation of the initiative and the brand. The results show that entertaining initiatives are suited for warm brands, but backfire for competent brands, while informative initiatives are equally suited for both types of brands. These effects are driven by the perceived authenticity of the initiatives. The findings yield specific guidelines for managers about how to preserve the brand's essence in the online initiatives they launch to foster ongoing customer engagement. The effects were found in four experiments and one field study, generalizing across different online media platforms (i.e., Instagram, Facebook, brand website), products and services (i.e., shoes, groceries, and recipe deliveries), and samples (i.e., Mturk, Prolific, students).

Individual and contextual determinants of adoption of online media services in the 2017 lower house election campaign in Japan

• Candidates adopted online media services in a consistent order (range: easy-difficult to operate); • MCA and Mokken analysis are useful scaling techniques to measure adoption of technology; • Individual and contextual characteristics both explain adoption of online media services; • Candidates on the PR list adopted more online media services than those in districts; • Incumbent candidates adopted more online media than new and former candidates; • Younger candidates adopt more online media for campaigning than older candidates. • In densely populated areas, candidates adopted more online media services for campaigning.

Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Live Video Streaming Security

The majority of the traffic in the internet is dedicated to video streaming and its applications. Content Network Networks are good enough in live video streaming. But, implementing live video streaming is not an easy task. Delivery of live video streams can be complicated because of the variety of platforms, network types and streaming formats competing in today's online media services. Every user’s expecting reliable high quality performance with data availability using heterogeneous choices. And it is now tougher than ever to ensure an agreeable, problem less viewing experience on live streaming. Another problem of video streaming is handling security issues, which need fast verification and effective attack resistance. CDN suffers from various security issues, here, a new prototype to perform secure content delivery especially on live video streaming. A lightweight video streaming authentication technique is developed, this authenticates and transmits the data and eliminates the unauthorized access.

Platforms and commercial communications aimed at children: a playground under legislative reform?

ABSTRACT Today’s online media services landscape is characterised by an increased convergence between traditional media and the delivery of over the internet content (audiovisual or otherwise). This convergence raises important new questions regarding the scope of the existing regulatory framework on commercial communications. Due to the complexity of the framework – which includes media law, consumer protection law, e-commerce law and data protection law – it is becoming ever more difficult to delineate the responsibilities of certain service providers (e.g. video-sharing platforms) for the commercial communications that appear on their platforms, not excluding their potential qualification as ‘controller’ or ‘processor’ under the EU data protection framework. It is therefore time to consider the potential impact of the ongoing legislative reforms for both traditional and new players on the media playground, to better understand their shared impact and responsibility. As such, this paper will analyse the different responsibilities these new internet platforms will face in the context of commercial communication aimed at a young audience. For this purpose, it will analyse the interplay between the different legislative instruments mentioned above to discover any gaps or clarify any overlaps, which could ultimately have a negative impact on the empowerment of children.

Content delivery simulations supported by social network-awareness

In this study we conduct experiments on a modified content delivery simulation framework, as we aspire to compare miscellaneous policies for dynamic OSN-aware content delivery. The incorporation of an OSN-aware dynamic mechanism becomes indispensable for CDN services, since (i)significantly large proportion of Internet traffic results from -easily produced via online media services and transmitted over OSNs- bandwidth-intensive multimedia content and (ii)multimedia content providers, such as YouTube, often rely on ubiquitous Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) infrastructures. Our policies take patterns of user activity over OSNs and exploit geo-social properties of users participating in retransmissions of items over OSNs (social cascades), proceed to incorporate various caching schemes of the underlying infrastructure, different policies for the handling of OSN data and various approaches that take into account the efficient timing of prefetching. The simulation framework we introduce can serve as the basis of further parameterized content delivery experimentation that exploits information transmission over OSNs and decreases replication costs by selectively copying items to locations where items are likely to be consumed.

Content delivery simulations supported by social network-awareness

In this study we conduct experiments on a modified content delivery simulation framework, as we aspire to compare miscellaneous policies for dynamic OSN-aware content delivery. The incorporation of an OSN-aware dynamic mechanism becomes indispensable for CDN services, since (i)significantly large proportion of Internet traffic results from -easily produced via online media services and transmitted over OSNs- bandwidth-intensive multimedia content and (ii)multimedia content providers, such as YouTube, often rely on ubiquitous Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) infrastructures. Our policies take patterns of user activity over OSNs and exploit geo-social properties of users participating in retransmissions of items over OSNs (social cascades), proceed to incorporate various caching schemes of the underlying infrastructure, different policies for the handling of OSN data and various approaches that take into account the efficient timing of prefetching. The simulation framework we introduce can serve as the basis of further parameterized content delivery experimentation that exploits information transmission over OSNs and decreases replication costs by selectively copying items to locations where items are likely to be consumed.

Book Review: Canada Lives Here: The Case for Public Broadcasting, by Wade Rowland

Wade Rowland Canada Lives Here: The Case for Public Broadcasting. Westmount, Quebec, Canada: Linda Leith Publishing, 2015. 240 pp.Canada Lives Here is a call for action to the Canadian people and their government. Wade Rowland draws upon his many years of experience in Canadian public television news and management to make a strong case supporting the importance of a robust public service broadcasting system to Canadian culture and democracy. However, Canada Lives Here also has an important message that goes beyond the borders of Canada. The message is that the role of the public broadcaster is to ensure that people in a democratic society can learn about important issues, engage culture and the arts, and constructively tackle the issues facing their nation.For Rowland, this role can only be fully achieved through noncommercial media. He asserts that crafters of necessary illusions and the manufacturers of consent theoretically do not influence noncommercial media, unlike their commercial counterparts (p. 2). Rowland is quite harsh on commercial broadcasters throughout this book, and he sometimes glosses over the fact that the governments with direct or indirect control of public broadcasting's purse strings may also have points of view that they hope will be expressed. However, the essence of this point is well-taken.Rowland believes that public broadcasting in Canada is in a state of decline. He supports this thesis by taking the reader on a historical tour of the origins of public broadcasting in Canada, through several administrations. Some of those administrations nurtured public broadcasting and others, through a number of measures, including budget cutting and administrative reorganization, brought the service to the brink of extinction.All public television systems receive some sort of funding from their country's government or a quasi-governmental agency like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in the United States. But ultimately the actual funds come from the people, and in the end, public broadcasting is expected to give back in the form of high quality programming that is beneficial to society. To do this effectively, a public broadcasting system must be adequately resourced. Rowland argues that Canadian public broadcasting lags far behind its European counterparts in the per capita subsidies at $28CAD. For example, he notes that in Norway's public broadcasting, funding is $180CAD per capita, while Germany's is $124 per capita and the United Kingdom is $97CAD per capita. As a point of information, in 2011, the United States spent $4USD per capita for public broadcasting (http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/ Funding-Public-Media-How-The-US-Compares-To-The-Rest-of-the-world/).Rowland worries that a combination of a dwindling subsidy, the migration of some heretofore public TV programs to commercial networks-including NHL Hockey-and a sense by some regulators that terrestrial broadcast television might no longer be necessary means that it could be replaced by less-expensive-to-operate online media services. …

A Novel Time Series Approach for Predicting the Long-Term Popularity of Online Videos

Predicting the video popularity is an essential part of fast growing online media services. It is beneficial to an array of domains, from targeted advertising, personalized recommendation, to traffic load optimization. However, popularity prediction is a challenge problem due to the uncertainty of information cascade. In this paper, we treat the popularity of online videos as time series over the given periods and propose a novel time series model for popularity prediction. The proposed model is based on the correlation between early and future popularity series. Instead of inferring the precise view counts for a video, this paper focuses on accurately identifying the most popular videos based on the predicted popularity, because it is of the most interest to service providers. Experimental result on real world data have demonstrated that the proposed model outperforms several existing popularity prediction models.

A content-adaptive video quality assessment method for online media service

Video quality assessment is an important issue for Internet Content Providers (ICPs) to improve their service. Some research has been done on objective video quality assessment, but real-time evaluation is still a difficult task. This paper discusses a real-time content-adaptive evaluation method to evaluate the Quality of Experiment (QoE) for online media services. The method is named as Motion Degree of Video Content (MDVC) which is defined to make the video content measureable and computable. It analyzes the relationship between the information entropy gain and the frame size of I, P and B frames, and then evaluates the motion degree of a video clip. Then with the help of a multimedia service simulation platform, a QoE evaluation model is established to map network QoS to QoE. The model is adjusted by MDVC so as to fit different video content dynamically. In particular, to ensure that the evaluation model fits the real-world conditions, PlanetLab is adopted to monitor the real QoS on Internet. Finally we compare the content-adaptive QoE evaluation model with the actual MOS values to verify the feasibility and fitness of the model. Results show that the correlation coefficient reaches 0.91.

Technology Acceptance and Perceived Reliability of Realistic Media Service

Convergence environment of broadcasting and telecommunication is emerged as a key part for new business opportunities reassembling value chains consisted of contents, platform, network, and devices. According to the development of information and communication technology, many customers are interested in acceptance and use of realistic media service. This paper examines the influence of technology acceptance and perceived reliability on intention to use realistic media service. A research model is suggested by integrating the original Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and perceived reliability, which is recognized as an important factor to measure user perception for online media service. In order to analyze the influence of user attitude and perceived reliability on usage intention of customers for realistic media service, this study empirically conducted a survey with data collection of 404 users. The results of data analysis showed that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived reliability influence positively on usage intention of realistic media service. This study provides an insight to complement the prior studies with empirical evidence.

Interactive ads recommendation with contextual search on product topic space

The rapid popularization of various online media services have attracted large amounts of consumers and shown us a large potential market of video advertising. In this paper, we propose interactive service recommendation based on ad concept hierarchy and contextual search. Instead of traditional ODP (Open Directory Project) based approach, we built a ad domain based concept hierarchy to make the most of the product details over the e-commerce sites. Firstly, we capture the summarization images related to the advertising product in the video content and search visually similar product images from the built product image database. Then, we aggregate the visual tags and textual tags with K-line clustering. Finally, we map them to the product concept space and make keywords suggestion, and users can interactively select keyframes or keywords to personalize their intentions by textual re-search. Experiments and comparison show that the system can accurately provide effective advertising suggestions.

Towards PSB 2.0? Applying the PSB ethos to online media in Europe: A comparative study of PSBs’ internet policies in Spain, Italy and Britain

European institutions such as the European Parliament and the European Council have repeatedly asserted the importance for public service broadcasters (PSBs) to develop online media services. The crucial necessity for PSBs to expand their new media activities has been emphasized by the Council of Europe in numerous Recommendations. The European Commission reaffirmed the opportunity for PSBs to expand online in the 2001 Communication on the application of state aid to public service broadcasters. However, the place and the weight of each European PSB in the online context differ from country to country since the determination of a PSB’s remit is still a prerogative of the member states. This article investigates how the public service broadcasting ethos has been applied to online media in three different European countries: Spain, Italy and Britain. It investigates the main policies adopted by the governments of these three nations to regulate the evolution of PSBs on the internet and the policies and practices adopted by the broadcasters: TVE (Spain), RAI (Italy) and the BBC (UK). It concludes by arguing that a new policy toolkit (PSB 2.0) is needed to infuse the online world with the same public service ethos that has characterized traditional broadcasting.

A novel user’s authentication scheme for pervasive on-line media services

Due to the explosive growth of the Internet and the pervasion of multimedia, protection of intellectual property (IP) rights of digital content in transactions induces people's concerns. Current security requirements and copyright protection mechanisms especially need to work in real-time and on-line for communication and networking. For media service systems in the Internet, user's authentication is most essential in association with the access control of the media system. The authentication scheme is a trivial but crucial issue for maintaining user's information. Up to now, many one-time password-based authentication schemes have been proposed. However, none is secure enough. The purpose of a one-time password (OTP) is to make it more difficult to gain unauthorized access to restricted resources. Traditionally static passwords can more easily be obtained by an unauthorized intruder given enough attempts and time. By constantly altering the password, as is done with a one-time password, this risk can be greatly reduced. These schemes are specially fit for media services in the Internet since they will frustrate the attacker's attempt. Lin, Shen and Hwang proposed a strong-password authentication scheme in association with one-time password by using smart cards, and claimed their scheme can resist guess attack, replay attack, impersonation attack and stolen attack. Later, Ku, Tsai, and Chen showed that Lin-Shen-Hwang's scheme suffers from a replay attack and a denial-of-service attack. Furthermore, Ku proposed a hash-based strong-password authentication scheme to enhance the security. In this paper, we show the weaknesses and devise some attacks against Ku's scheme. Then, we revise Ku's scheme and propose a novel user's authentication scheme in pervasive on-line media services for current communication and networking.

Headlight Prefetching and Dynamic Chaining for Cooperative Media Streaming in Mobile Environments

Media streaming in mobile environments is becoming more and more important with the proliferation of 3G technologies and the popularity of online media services such as news clips, live sports, and hot movies. To avoid service interruptions, proper data management strategies must be taken by all parties. We propose a two-level framework and cooperative techniques for mobile media streaming. Headlight prefetching is for the cooperation of streaming access points to deal with unpredictable client movement and seamless hand-off. For each user, we maintain a virtual fan-shaped prefetching zone along the direction of movement similar to a vehicle headlight. The overlapping area and accumulated virtual illuminance of the headlight zone on a particular cell determine the degree and volume of prefetching on that cell. Dynamic chaining facilitates cooperation among users to maximize cache utilization and streaming benefit. On receiving a request from a client, the streaming access point starts a search for supplying partners before attempting to a remote media server. If a qualified partner is found, the client is chained to the partner and receives subsequent segments without server intervention. The client can itself be a supplying partner for other clients and naturally form a chain of users that are viewing and sharing the same media. Simulation results demonstrate that headlight prefetching and dynamic chaining can significantly decrease streaming disruptions, reduce bandwidth consumption, increase cache utilization and improve service response time.

LOCAL MUSICIANS BUILDING GLOBAL AUDIENCES

This paper builds upon existing work regarding the social contexts of interactive on-line content creation. Through an ethnographic examination of local-level music production and distribution in two American college towns, I demonstrate how musicians cultivate audiences through social capital that is exchanged both on-line and off-line. Active social networking is crucial to their music distribution and promotion. Through digital file sharing and social networking sites, musicians mobilize bonded social capital around their image and music. However, they have difficulty bridging the networks they cultivate with a broader audience, despite their desire to do so. This paper concludes with a sketch of the possibilities for musicians to develop bridging social capital, noting that new media industries capitalize on this desire, turning producers of on-line content into consumers of on-line media content and services. By employing a framework of social networks and social capital, this paper contributes more broadly to sociological understanding of how culture is transmitted through social networks and how social capital is an important resource in the ability to gain recognition for one's cultural expressions in the digital age.

A novel software key container in on-line media services

Due to the explosive growth of the Internet and the pervasion of multimedia, protection of IP rights of digital content in transactions induces people’s concerns. For fee-based media services, data encryption may be the best solution for protection of the media. The encryption (decryption) keys placement may be a trivial but crucial issue for users. It is a significant issue that how to practically protect user’s key with the password-based cryptographic scheme and at different security levels. Nowadays, key container storing user’s key can be implemented by hardware or software-only. Unfortunately, the hardware key containers require expensive infrastructure; On the other hand, the software-only key containers are either insecure or impractical. Moreover, both of the hardware and software just store user’s key with the single security level. To solve these problems, we propose a novel software key container in on-line media services that can provide an adaptively secure and practical solution to protect user’s key. We use a human-trapdoor distortion function and symmetric cipher to protect user’s key in our key container so that it is computationally infeasible to break the system by using machine attack alone. The idea is to ensure that people must participate to verify each guessed password in the attack. User can adjust the security level of container according to the security requirement. Therefore, the attacker cannot succeed to extract user’s key within a reasonable time and budget.