Measurements and Analysis of an Unconstrained User Generated Content System

User-Generated Content (UGC) is overwhelming the Internet with its interactivity and various contents. However, traditional UGC still have constrains on videos\´ length and size, which block out a wide variety of potential popular contents. In this paper, we present the first experimental measurements and analysis of an Unconstrained User-Generated Content (UUGC) system - a test site (so-called "T" site in this paper) of a leading VOD service provider in China. This test site is a video-sharing portal just like traditional UGC, while its contents are not constrained by either duration or size. As an UUGC system, its most distinguishing characteristics are the various types of contents uploaded (movie, TV episode, TV show, music, documentary, sports, etc.) and the wide range of uploaders, which make it an interesting case study. By matching relative key words in video\´s index, we classify the contents into several basic types and analyze the statistics of three major types - movie, TV episode and TV show (labeled MVI, TV-E and TV-S). For further study of various contents, we demonstrate the patterns of flash crowd triggering of MVI, TV-E and TV-S with several typical cases. To find out the viewers\´ consumption pattern, we investigate daily & weekly cycles, as well as grouping the videos by age and exhibiting the popularity evolution. By means of curve fitting with multiple known distributions to video view traces, we show that power law with exponential cutoff best fits the videos\´ popularity distribution for this UUGC system.