ACM IMC 2008

Watching Television Over an IP Network

Meeyoung Cha
MPI-SWS

Pablo Rodriguez
Telefonica Research

Sue Moon
KAIST

Jon Crowcroft
U. of Cambridge

Xavier Amatriain
Telefonica Research

Internet TV (IPTV)
Delivering television channels over an IP network 20M subscribers worldwide in 2008 Popular types
1. Telcos nation-wide provisioned service
By AT&T, France Telecom, Korea Telecom, Telefonica

2. Web TV
Joost, Zatoo, VeohTV, Babelgum, BBCs iPlayer

3. Box-based video-on-demand
Apple TV, Vudu box, Sonys Internet video link

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Why study TV viewing patterns?

Understanding of human viewing behaviors
Identify social and demographic aspects, user profiling

Cost-efficient design of distribution architectures

Evaluate existing designs and explore new ones

Design better channel guides and advertisements

Help people find interesting programs more quickly

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Challenges in traditional TV research

Nielsen TV rating
Select representative samples Install metering devices at sampled homes Extrapolate statistics across a nation < Drawbacks > Potential bias in sampling Awareness to metering may alter user behaviors

Gathering data from a large number of samples challenging

IPTV allows for continuous and detailed TV analysis!
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A first study on Telcos IPTV workloads

Collected raw data of everybody watching TV
A quarter million users from a large IPTV system (entire subscribers within a nation) 150 channels including various genres (free-to-air, children, sports, movies, music, etc) Collected traces for 6 months

Largest scale study on TV viewing patterns

User base 10 times larger than the Nielsens

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Telcos IPTV service architecture

TV head end customer premise DSLAM All 150 channels TV

IP backbone

1-2 channels

Set-top box

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Data collection
Users channel change input
IGMP messages collected across all 700 DSLAMs
Collected here

Trace example
Timestamp DSLAM IP Set-top box IP Multicast channel IP Action (join or leave)
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DSLAM

set-top-box

Part1. IPTV overview and dataset

Part2. Analysis of viewing patterns

Part3. Channel change probability

Channel holding times

60% channel changes happen within 10 seconds Infrastructure must support fast channel changes

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Assumptions about user modes

Difficulty in inferring user away mode
TV is OFF; or left ON without any viewer

Determined active users as those who change channels within a one hour threshold period
Tested with longer thresholds

Demarcate viewing from surfing by the minute

Nielsen also uses 1 minute threshold

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Three user modes

Each user in one of the three states at any given time Active session: consecutive time spent on surfing or viewing

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Session characteristics
Durations
An average household watched 2.54 hours of TV and 6.3 channels (distinct) a day Each active session lasted 1.2 hours Each viewing event lasted 14.8 minutes

Per content genre

Average surfing time longer for documentaries and movies (9-11 sec) than news, music, and sports (6-7 sec)

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Diurnal pattern
Viewing hours across users highly correlated Two peaks at lunch (3PM) and dinner (10PM) times

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Diurnal pattern with longer away threshold

Applied 2-hour thresholds for certain genres (movies, documentaries, sports, etc)

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Channel popularity
90% of concurrent viewers watch 20% of channels Follow the Pareto principal

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Time evolution of channel popularity

Viewer share of top channels higher at peak times Popularity of top channels reinforced at peak times

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Implications of viewing patterns

60% of channel changes within 10 seconds (surfing)
=> Challenges for P2P-based IPTV systems

User focus followed the Pareto principal

=> IP multicast not efficient for unpopular channels

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Part1. IPTV overview and dataset

Part2. Analysis of viewing patterns

Part3. Channel change probability

Channel change patterns

Our goal is to understand
How do people browse through channels? Do they use electronic program guide? Do channel changes result in viewing? How do users join and leave a particular channel?

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Channel change probability

Probability of joining channel y after joining channel x

60% linear

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Channel viewing probability

Probability of viewing channel y after viewing channel x
67% non-linear

60% within genre

17% to the same channel

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User arrival and departure rates

Batch-like arrivals and departures Inheritance (continued viewing even after channel changes)
arrival

departure

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Implications of channel change patterns

Disparity in how we change and view channels
=> Design of efficient program guide

High churn, especially during commercial breaks

=> Challenging for P2P-based IPTV systems

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Summary
The first work to analyze television viewing patterns from complete raw data of IPTV users Implications on the architecture
Support fast channel changes Handle high churn during commercials Reflect Pareto channel popularity

Implications on the viewing guide

Devise a better way to browse channels Personalize suggestions for users
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Backup: inferring user modes

When static 2-hour threshold used for demarcating active and inactive sessions

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Backup: IPTV hot issues

How is IPTV different from traditional TV? Why telcos deploy IPTV? Modeling TV viewing habits Implications on P2P

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