21,554 research outputs found
The impact of the soccer schedule on TV viewership and stadium attendance : evidence from the Belgian Pro League
In the past decade, television broadcasters have been investing a huge
amount of money for the Belgian Pro League broadcasting rights. These
companies pursue an audience rating maximization, which depends heavily on the schedule of the league matches. At the same time, clubs try to maximize their home attendance and find themselves affected by the schedule as well. Our paper aims to capture the Belgian soccer fans’ preferences with respect to scheduling options, both for watching matches on TV and in the stadium. We carried out a discrete choice experiment using an online survey questionnaire distributed on a national scale. The choice sets are based on three match characteristics: month, kickoff time, and quality of the opponent. The first part of this survey concerns television broadcasting aspects. The second part includes questions about stadium attendance. The choice data is first analyzed with a conditional logit model which assumes homogenous preferences. Then a mixed logit model is fit to model the heterogeneity among the fans. The estimates are used to calculate the expected utility of watching a Belgian Pro League match for every possible setting, either on TV or in the stadium. These predictions are validated in terms of the real audience rating and home attendance data. Our results can be used to improve the scheduling process of the Belgian Pro League in order to persuade more fans to watch the matches on TV or in a stadium
Dependable Distributed Computing for the International Telecommunication Union Regional Radio Conference RRC06
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Regional Radio Conference
(RRC06) established in 2006 a new frequency plan for the introduction of
digital broadcasting in European, African, Arab, CIS countries and Iran. The
preparation of the plan involved complex calculations under short deadline and
required dependable and efficient computing capability. The ITU designed and
deployed in-situ a dedicated PC farm, in parallel to the European Organization
for Nuclear Research (CERN) which provided and supported a system based on the
EGEE Grid. The planning cycle at the RRC06 required a periodic execution in the
order of 200,000 short jobs, using several hundreds of CPU hours, in a period
of less than 12 hours. The nature of the problem required dynamic
workload-balancing and low-latency access to the computing resources. We
present the strategy and key technical choices that delivered a reliable
service to the RRC06
New issues in attendance demand: the case of the English football league
This paper uses an attendance demand model with panel data on over 4,000 games to examine economic problems of fixture congestion in English Football League schedules. We find that televised midweek Champions League matches involving English Premier League clubs have substantial adverse impacts on lower division Football League gate attendance. This suggests that affected clubs may have a case for compensation from the Premier League for loss of gate revenue from this source. Scheduling of home games close to one another also has an adverse impact on attendance. Reorganisation of fixture schedules and/or redistribution of income would help offset adverse impacts on team revenues from midweek scheduling.
V2X Content Distribution Based on Batched Network Coding with Distributed Scheduling
Content distribution is an application in intelligent transportation system
to assist vehicles in acquiring information such as digital maps and
entertainment materials. In this paper, we consider content distribution from a
single roadside infrastructure unit to a group of vehicles passing by it. To
combat the short connection time and the lossy channel quality, the downloaded
contents need to be further shared among vehicles after the initial
broadcasting phase. To this end, we propose a joint infrastructure-to-vehicle
(I2V) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication scheme based on batched sparse
(BATS) coding to minimize the traffic overhead and reduce the total
transmission delay. In the I2V phase, the roadside unit (RSU) encodes the
original large-size file into a number of batches in a rateless manner, each
containing a fixed number of coded packets, and sequentially broadcasts them
during the I2V connection time. In the V2V phase, vehicles perform the network
coded cooperative sharing by re-encoding the received packets. We propose a
utility-based distributed algorithm to efficiently schedule the V2V cooperative
transmissions, hence reducing the transmission delay. A closed-form expression
for the expected rank distribution of the proposed content distribution scheme
is derived, which is used to design the optimal BATS code. The performance of
the proposed content distribution scheme is evaluated by extensive simulations
that consider multi-lane road and realistic vehicular traffic settings, and
shown to significantly outperform the existing content distribution protocols.Comment: 12 pages and 9 figure
V2X Meets NOMA: Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for 5G Enabled Vehicular Networks
Benefited from the widely deployed infrastructure, the LTE network has
recently been considered as a promising candidate to support the
vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services. However, with a massive number of devices
accessing the V2X network in the future, the conventional OFDM-based LTE
network faces the congestion issues due to its low efficiency of orthogonal
access, resulting in significant access delay and posing a great challenge
especially to safety-critical applications. The non-orthogonal multiple access
(NOMA) technique has been well recognized as an effective solution for the
future 5G cellular networks to provide broadband communications and massive
connectivity. In this article, we investigate the applicability of NOMA in
supporting cellular V2X services to achieve low latency and high reliability.
Starting with a basic V2X unicast system, a novel NOMA-based scheme is proposed
to tackle the technical hurdles in designing high spectral efficient scheduling
and resource allocation schemes in the ultra dense topology. We then extend it
to a more general V2X broadcasting system. Other NOMA-based extended V2X
applications and some open issues are also discussed.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications Magazin
Challenges of digital innovations : a set-top box based approach
The chapter analyses the challenges of digital technology for television audience measurement systems. First, the current state of audience measurement in Belgium is described. In the Belgian case, the traditional television audience measurement system is contested by small broadcasters and challenged by the opportunities that the emergence of digital television and, more specifically, the widespread diffusion of set-top boxes provide. Second, three major challenges for traditional measurement techniques are analysed. This section deals with people’s changing viewing habits, for example on-demand and time-shifted viewing, the provision of more accurate data by set-top boxes, and the increasing interests of platform operators acting as gatekeepers to access to this data. In the final section, conclusions are made
Splitting schedules for Internet broadcast communication
The broadcast disk provides an effective way to transmit information from a server to many clients. Work has been done to schedule the broadcast of information in a way that minimizes the expected waiting time of the clients. Much of this work has treated the information as indivisible blocks. We look at splitting items into smaller pieces that need not be broadcast consecutively. This allows us to have better schedules with lower expected waiting times. We look at the case of two items of the same length, each split into two halves, and show how to achieve optimal performance. We prove the surprising result that there are only two possible types of optimal cyclic schedules for items 1, and 2. These start with 1122 and 122122. For example, with demand probabilities p1= 0.08 and p2= 0.92, the best order to use in broadcasting the halves of items 1 and 2 is a cyclic schedule with cycle 122122222. We also look at items of different lengths and show that much of the analysis remains the same, resulting in a similar set of optimal schedules
Effective scheduling algorithm for on-demand XML data broadcasts in wireless environments
The organization of data on wireless channels, which aims to reduce the access time of mobile clients, is a key problem in data broadcasts. Many scheduling algorithms have been designed to organize flat data on air. However, how to effectively schedule semi-structured information such as XML data on wireless channels is still a challenge. In this paper, we firstly propose a novel method to greatly reduce the tuning time by splitting query results into XML snippets and to achieve better access efficiency by combining similar ones. Then we analyze the data broadcast scheduling problem of on-demand XML data broadcasts and
define the efficiency of a data item. Based on the definition, a Least Efficient Last (LEL) scheduling algorithm is also devised to effectively organize XML
data on wireless channels. Finally, we study the performance of our algorithms through extensive experiments. The results show that our scheduling algorithms can reduce both access time and tuning time
signifcantly when compared with existing work
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