Analysing User Viewing Behaviour in Video Streaming Services

Abstract: The user experience offered by a video streaming service plays a fundamental role in customer satisfaction. This experience can be degraded by poor playback quality and buffering issues. These problems can be caused by a user demand that is higher than the video streaming service capacity. Resource scaling methods can increase the available resources to cover the need. However, most resource scaling systems are reactive and scale up in an automated fashion when a certain demand threshold is exceeded. During popular live streaming content, the demand can be so high that even by scaling up at the last minute, the system might still be momentarily under-provisioned, resulting in a bad user experience. The solution to this problem is proactive scaling which is event-based, using content-related information to scale up or down, according to knowledge from past events. As a result, proactive resource scaling is a key factor in providing reliable video streaming services. Users viewing habits heavily affect demand. To provide an accurate model for proactive resource scaling tools, these habits need to be modelled. This thesis provides such a forecasting model for user views that can be used by a proactive resource scaling mechanism. This model is created by applying machine learning algorithms to data from both live TV and over-the-top streaming services. To produce a model with satisfactory accuracy, numerous data attributes were considered relating to users, content and content providers. The findings of this thesis show that user viewing demand can be modelled with high accuracy, without heavily relying on user-related attributes but instead by analysing past event logs and with knowledge of the schedule of the content provider, whether it is live tv or a video streaming service.