Analysis and Modeling of Video Popularity Evolution in Various Online Video Content Systems: Power-Law versus Exponential Decay

Internet evolved from a world communication network with restricted information transmission capabilities into an entertainment and information network with many broadband clients and more multimedia-rich applications. In particular, video (streaming) applications are gaining in popularity and usage, but those are also notorious for their high resources demand. A study of the popularity evolution of videos in different online video content systems can give insight and have implications for adequate network dimensioning. In this paper we study and model the popularity evolution of some video traces from YouTube, one Dutch catch-up TV online portal, and historical data on DVD rentals in the US. The model we put forward can degenerate into either a power-law distribution or an exponential distribution depending on its form-determining parameter. We find out that not all traces have a power-law decay as suggested in other works, but also a significant part of those expose an exponential popularity evolution.