A Large-Scale Characterization of User Behaviour in Cable TV

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of user interaction patterns with various Cable TV services like Live TV, Catch-up TV, and VOD, offering insights to improve user engagement and recommendation systems.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale characterization of user behavior across multiple Cable TV services, including usage, engagement, and content preferences.

Findings

Users prefer Catch-up TV for recent broadcasts

Engagement varies by program type and genre

Insights can enhance recommendation systems

Abstract

Nowadays, Cable TV operators provide their users multiple ways to watch TV content, such as Live TV and Video on Demand (VOD) services. In the last years, Catch-up TV has been introduced, allowing users to watch recent broadcast content whenever they want to. Understanding how the users interact with such services is important to develop solutions that may increase user satisfaction , user engagement and user consumption. In this paper, we characterize, for the first time, how users interact with a large European Cable TV operator that provides Live TV, Catch-up TV and VOD services. We analyzed many characteristics, such as the service usage, user engagement, program type, program genres and time periods. This characterization will help us to have a deeper understanding on how users interact with these different services, that may be used to enhance the recommendation systems of Cable TV providers.