Determining leaders and clusters in video consumption
14 October 2013
In this paper we analyze a trace of a real deployed VoD (video on demand) system. Users issue requests for assets in an online VoD catalog at given moments in time. Based on this information alone we identify communities of users that have similar content preferences, which we refer to implicit social communities. We find that there is evidence for a limited number of akin users. Next we also determine lead users, i.e., users that consume content assets (that in the end will become popular) consistently before other users. We show that such users can be identified in the considered data set. These two pieces of information could be used to improve recommendation systems and content distribution networks.
