On Factors Affecting the Usage and Adoption of a Nation-wide TV Streaming Service

TL;DR

This study analyzes nine months of BBC iPlayer access logs to identify factors influencing the adoption and usage patterns of a nationwide TV streaming service, highlighting the roles of connection speeds, external events, and data caps.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the UK ISP ecosystem, revealing how connection speeds, external events, and data caps impact streaming usage and proposing strategies like product bundling and pre-fetching to improve user experience.

Findings

Connection speeds significantly influence usage patterns.

External events cause large fluctuations in live TV consumption.

Data caps by mobile ISPs restrict data usage and affect user behavior.

Abstract

Using nine months of access logs comprising 1.9 Billion sessions to BBC iPlayer, we survey the UK ISP ecosystem to understand the factors affecting adoption and usage of a high bandwidth TV streaming application across different providers. We find evidence that connection speeds are important and that external events can have a huge impact for live TV usage. Then, through a temporal analysis of the access logs, we demonstrate that data usage caps imposed by mobile ISPs significantly affect usage patterns, and look for solutions. We show that product bundle discounts with a related fixed-line ISP, a strategy already employed by some mobile providers, can better support user needs and capture a bigger share of accesses. We observe that users regularly split their sessions between mobile and fixed-line connections, suggesting a straightforward strategy for offloading by speculatively pre-fetching content from a fixed-line ISP before access on mobile devices.