Exploring the Emerging Domain of Research on Video Game Live Streaming in Web of Science: State of the Art, Changes and Trends

In recent years, interest in video game live streaming services has increased as a new communication instrument, social network, source of leisure, and entertainment platform for millions of users. The rise in this type of service has been accompanied by an increase in research on these platforms. As an emerging domain of research focused on this novel phenomenon takes shape, it is necessary to delve into its nature and antecedents. The main objective of this research is to provide a comprehensive reference that allows future analyses to be addressed with greater rigor and theoretical depth. In this work, we developed a meta-review of the literature supported by a bibliometric performance and network analysis (BPNA). We used the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) protocol to obtain a representative sample of 111 published documents since 2012 and indexed in the Web of Science. Additionally, we exposed the main research topics developed to date, which allowed us to detect future research challenges and trends. The findings revealed four specializations or subdomains: studies focused on the transmitter or streamer; the receiver or the audience; the channel or platform; and the transmission process. These four specializations add to the accumulated knowledge through the development of six core themes that emerge: motivations, behaviors, monetization of activities, quality of experience, use of social networks and media, and gender issues

An evaluation of video quality assessment metrics for passive gaming video streaming

Video quality assessment is imperative to estimate the user experience to provide a reasonable Quality of Experience in video streaming applications to the end-user. Recent years have seen a tremendous advancement in the field of video quality assessment (VQA) metrics, with the development of models that can predict the quality of the videos streamed over the Internet. However, no work so far has attempted to study the performance of such quality assessment metrics on gaming videos which are artificial and synthetic and have different streaming requirements than traditionally streamed videos. Towards this end, we present in this paper an objective and subjective quality assessment study of gaming videos considering passive streaming applications. For subjective quality assessment, we consider six different gaming video sequences and 15 resolution-bitrate pairs. Objective quality assessment considering eight widely used VQA metrics is performed on a dataset of 24 reference videos and 576 compressed sequences obtained by encoding them at 24 different resolution-bitrate pairs. We present an evaluation of the performance behavior of the VQA metrics. Our results indicate that VMAF predicts subjective video quality ratings the best, while NIQE turns out to be a very promising alternative as a no-reference metric