Live Streaming: Its Relevant Concepts and Literature Review

Live streaming is a new form of social applications involving video content, consumption and real-time human interaction to facilitate users’ ability to interact with each other. Despite the increasing popularity of live streaming and its influence on business and society, relatively little research has been conducted to understand what we know and what we need to know about it. Therefore, a systematic review of the existing literature was carried out to synthesize the research findings. Accordingly, we systematically reviewed 133 useable papers published across 52 academic journals and 10 conferences with regards to research trends, topics, methodology, and contexts. This study offers a thorough understanding of current practices in live streaming, which may help businesses to better realize their live streaming deployment objectives

Pick the Right Tactics When Online Sales Go Live: An Empirical Analysis of Livestreaming for Amazon Sellers

Using livestreaming to boost sales has become an essential strategy to achieve deeper interactions with customers for many large e-commerce platforms worldwide. Existing livestreaming literature has looked at multiple Chinese e-commerce platforms but not enough attention has been paid to the U.S. market. This study investigates consumer behaviors and the promotion efficacy in the Livestream setting on Amazon Live. We analyze the time patterns of customer engagement and explain why sellers should use different promotion strategies for weekdays and for weekend streamers. Besides, we present evidence that the average video display time per product is crucial for the livestream promotion efficacy and suggest optimal time-exposure intervals as a benchmark for sellers to align with

Predicting Twitch.tv Donations using Sentiment Analysis

Twitch.tv streamers have a rare opportunity to receive immediate feedback from their audience through a real-time chat log that is rife with sentiment information. Tools that can help a streamer understand how they need to influence their audience can be useful in increasing the donations and subscriptions they earn. Although millions around the world stream on Twitch, only a minuscule fraction of these streamers earn a living streaming alone. This paper aimed to provide muchneeded guidance to enable more streamers to succeed. We used stream logs, known as VODs (video on demand), which can be easily accessed through Twitch’s API or web interface, and parsed these logs for chat and donation data. After normalizing the data, we performed sentiment analysis using a combination of VADER, TextBlob, and Flair algorithms. We found that chat sentiment is a useful indicator for predicting the occurrence of donations. The results have set the foundation future researchers and developers can use to create tools and further our collective understanding of stream viewer sentiment

Your Privilege Gives Your Privacy Away: An Analysis of a Home Security Camera Service

Once considered a luxury, Home Security Cameras (HSCs) are now commonplace and constitute a growing part of the wider online video ecosystem. This paper argues that their expanding coverage and close integration with daily life may result in not only unique behavioral patterns, but also key privacy concerns. This motivates us to perform a detailed measurement study of a major HSC provider, covering 15.4M streams and 211K users. Our study takes two perspectives: (i) we explore the per-user behaviour, identifying core clusters of users; and (ii) we build on this analysis to extract and predict privacy-compromising insight. Key observations include a highly asymmetrical traffic distribution, distinct usage patterns, wasted resources and fixed viewing locations. Furthermore, we identify three privacy risks and explore them in detail. We find that paid users are more likely to be exposed to attacks due to their heavier usage patterns. We conclude by proposing simple mitigations that can alleviate these risk

Social media and live streaming : reaching and engaging fans? : the case of Facebook Live and the Queensland Maroons : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for a PhD in Sport and Exercise at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Social media has profoundly changed the way sport organisations communicate with their fans by encouraging consumers to interact directly with event and player activity. While there has been an abundance of research examining the broad effects of social media on sport organisations, there has been a paucity to date around the usage of live streaming. As such, this research explores the case of one elite sport organisation, the Queensland Maroons, and how live-streaming was incorporated into their Facebook page by using Facebook Live over the entire 2017 and 2018 State of Origin seasons. This study sought to uncover the positioning of the live streaming component within the organisation’s overall social media strategy and how live-streaming may impact fan engagement by using a multi-method approach involving semi-structured interviews with the organisation’s social media managers, a content analysis of related Facebook posts and a thematic analysis of fan responses. The findings revealed that live streaming may be disruptive to a conventional social media strategy, as not all live posts are ‘engaging’ by design. However, live streaming can be an engaging proposition when it provides exclusive content that allows the fan to experience authentic insights into the rituals and traditions of their favourite sport team and athletes in ‘real-time’. Furthermore, live streaming may provide an immersive experience, and encourage fan-to-fan interaction and fan-to-sport organisation interaction, resulting in a sense of community and fan engagement. Three unique management challenges were identified: (1) access to athletes; (2) live-streaming resourcing and (3) understanding and determining ‘engaging’ live streams. Consequently, a conceptual model was formed to assist sport organisations to provide a strategic, structured approach to social media, of which live streaming can be a critical, useful component. It provides seven categories of live videos on a scale of engagement and ways in which fans may respond to these posts to assist sport managers to plan specific content to encourage interaction and fan engagement

Time-Shifted Prefetching and Edge-Caching of Video Content: Insights, Algorithms, and Solutions

Video traffic accounts for 82% of global Internet traffic and is growing at an unprecedented rate. As a result of this rapid growth and popularity of video content, the network is heavily burdened. To cope with this, service providers have to spend several millions of dollars for infrastructure upgrades; these upgrades are typically triggered when there is a reasonably sustained peak usage that exceeds 80% of capacity. In this context, with network traffic load being significantly higher during peak periods (up to 5 times as much), we explore the problem of prefetching video content during off-peak periods of the network even when such periods are substantially separated from the actual usage-time. To this end, we collected YouTube and Netflix usage from over 1500 users spanning at least a one-year period consisting of approximately 8.5 million videos collectively watched. We use the datasets to analyze and present key insights about user-level usage behavior, and show that our analysis can be used by researchers to tackle a myriad of problems in the general domains of networking and communication. Thereafter, equipped with the datasets and our derived insights, we develop a set of data-driven prediction and prefetching solutions, using machine-learning and deep-learning techniques (specifically supervised classifiers and LSTM networks), which anticipates the video content the user will consume based on their prior watching behavior, and prefetches it during off-peak periods. We find that our developed solutions can reduce nearly 35% of peak-time YouTube traffic and 70% of peak-time Netflix series traffic. We developed and evaluated a proof-of-concept system for prefetching video traffic. We also show how to integrate the two systems for prefetching YouTube and Netflix content. Furthermore, based on our findings from our developed algorithms, we develop a framework for prefetching video content regardless of the type of video and platform upon which it is hosted.Ph.D

Millennials' motivation to consume sport content online

Until fairly recently, South Africans' opportunities for sports spectatorship were limited to real life events or traditional media, such as linear television. Due to the proliferation of streaming services and media content that have become available over the Internet in recent years, South African sports enthusiasts now have the widest range of access to a myriad of digital platforms that are available anytime and anywhere (ICASA, 2018). The first adopters with the widest access to these new platforms are young (Millennial) sports enthusiasts. As this consumer group grows in purchasing power, so does their influence on how sport content is presented and will be presented in the future, as well as the financial viability of service providers in the future. The purpose of the study is to gain empirical evidence of the sports consumption behaviour of the emergent Millennial consumer in South Africa, with specific focus on the different media sources used to view sports content, as well as their motivations to do so. A positivistic approach was taken to the research design, to enable the gathering of quantifiable evidence through an online electronic survey: 175 valid respondents made up the sample. Although the sample size was large enough to merit the anticipated statistical analyses, the findings were unfortunately not generalisable as the sample was not representative of the target population in Gauteng in terms of the demographic split. Results revealed that of all the technologies available, traditional live TV is still the most preferred medium for sports viewing. Evidence of interest in certain media may be indicative of more pertinent trends in the future. The strongest motivations that spurred Millennials' use of online for sports consumption, seem to be Convenience and control, followed by a relatively strong motivation to enhance Personal interest and preference, to gain Value for money and Affordability, and for Customisation and Entertainment. Demographic differences are limited to one of the motivational factors, namely Social interaction, that is not a strong motivation compared to the others. The research concluded with recommendations to broadcasters, highlighting the need to provide online service offerings that make use of the media's superior functionality in order to meet Millennials' need for convenience and control of their sport content consumption.Mini Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2018.kr2019Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS)MB

LiveRetro: Visual Analytics for Strategic Retrospect in Livestream E-Commerce

Livestream e-commerce integrates live streaming and online shopping, allowing viewers to make purchases while watching. However, effective marketing strategies remain a challenge due to limited empirical research and subjective biases from the absence of quantitative data. Current tools fail to capture the interdependence between live performances and feedback. This study identified computational features, formulated design requirements, and developed LiveRetro, an interactive visual analytics system. It enables comprehensive retrospective analysis of livestream e-commerce for streamers, viewers, and merchandise. LiveRetro employs enhanced visualization and time-series forecasting models to align performance features and feedback, identifying influences at channel, merchandise, feature, and segment levels. Through case studies and expert interviews, the system provides deep insights into the relationship between live performance and streaming statistics, enabling efficient strategic analysis from multiple perspectives.Comment: Accepted by IEEE VIS 202

Integration of a recommender system into an online video streaming platform

The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a recommender system for the SmartVideo platform. The platform streams different content of local channels for the Grand Est Region of France to a large public. So, we aim to propose a solution to alleviate the data representation and data collection issue of recommender systems by adopting and adjusting the xAPI standard to fit our case of study and to be able to represent our usage data in a formal and consistent format. Then, we will propose and implement a bunch of recommendation algorithms that we are going to test in order to evaluate our developed recommender system.Le but ultime de ce projet est de développer un système de recommandation dédié à la plateforme SmartVideo de diffusion de vidéo en ligne. En effet, la plateforme met à disposition diverses contenus des chaînes locales de la région Grand Est du France. Alors, nous allons présenter une solution pour alléger le problème de représentation et de collecte de données d’usages par adopter et ajuster le standard xAPI pour représenter et collecter les données de façon simple et formelle. Ensuite, nous allons proposer et implanter des algorithmes de recommandation que nous allons les tester pour évaluer notre système de recommandation