User Behavior and Engagement of a Mobile Video Streaming User from Crowdsourced Measurements

Abstract

Mobile video streaming has gained a lot of popularity in recent year with the introduction of large data plans for mobile phones. While users in non-mobile scenarios have become accustomed to high quality and few stalling events, this is not the case in mobile environments. People are more likely to tolerate stalling since they know high throughput coverage cannot always be guaranteed. Their behavior and their engagement are drastically different when watching videos on mobile devices. In this paper, we characterize mobile phone users who use a video streaming application. We present a data set of over 6,000 video views from a crowdsourced video measurement study. We investigate user activity and engagement during video streaming and how such metrics are correlated with each other. This is the first study that goes beyond user engagement and investigates the direct behavior of mobile video users outside the lab which is an important step towards mobile QoE management.