Understanding the Characteristics of Internet Short Video Sharing: YouTube as a Case Study

摘要

Established in 2005, YouTube has become the most successful Internet siteproviding a new generation of short video sharing service. Today, YouTube alonecomprises approximately 20% of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10% of all trafficon the Internet. Understanding the features of YouTube and similar videosharing sites is thus crucial to their sustainable development and to networktraffic engineering. In this paper, using traces crawled in a 3-month period,we present an in-depth and systematic measurement study on the characteristicsof YouTube videos. We find that YouTube videos have noticeably differentstatistics compared to traditional streaming videos, ranging from length andaccess pattern, to their active life span, ratings, and comments. The series ofdatasets also allows us to identify the growth trend of this fast evolvingInternet site in various aspects, which has seldom been explored before. Wealso look closely at the social networking aspect of YouTube, as this is a keydriving force toward its success. In particular, we find that the links torelated videos generated by uploaders' choices form a small-world network. Thissuggests that the videos have strong correlations with each other, and createsopportunities for developing novel caching or peer-to-peer distribution schemesto efficiently deliver videos to end users.