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Abstract:
For half a century, television has been a dominant and pervasive mass media,
driving many technological advances. Despite its widespread usage and
importance to emerging applications, the ingrained TV viewing habits are not
completely understood. This was primarily due to the difficulty of
instrumenting monitoring devices at individual homes at a large scale. The
recent boom of Internet TV (IPTV) has enabled us to monitor the user behavior
and network usage of an entire network. Such analysis can provide a clearer
picture of how people watch TV and how the underlying networks and systems can
better adapt to future challenges. In this paper, we present the first analysis
of IPTV workloads based on network traces from one of the world's largest IPTV
systems. Our dataset captures the channel change activities of 250,000
households over a six month period. We characterize the properties of viewing
sessions, channel popularity dynamics, geographical locality, and channel
switching behaviors. We discuss implications of our findings on networks and
systems, including the support needed for fast channel changes. Our data
analysis of an operational IPTV system has important implications on not only
existing and future IPTV systems, but also the design of the open Internet TV
distribution systems such as Joost and BBC's iPlayer that distribute television
on the wider Internet.
