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Just One More: Modeling Binge Watching Behavior

Published: 13 August 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Easy accessibility can often lead to over-consumption, as seen in food and alcohol habits. On video on-demand (VOD) services, this has recently been referred to as binge watching, where potentially entire seasons of TV shows are consumed in a single viewing session. While a user viewership model may reveal this binging behavior, creating an accurate model has several challenges, including censored data, deviations in the population, and the need to consider external influences on consumption habits. In this paper, we introduce a novel statistical mixture model that incorporates these factors and presents a first of its kind characterization of viewer consumption behavior using a real-world dataset that includes playback data from a VOD service. From our modeling, we tackle various predictive tasks to infer the consumption decisions of a user in a viewing session, including estimating the number of episodes they watch and classifying if they continue watching another episode. Using these insights, we then identify binge watching sessions based on deviation from normal viewing behavior. We observe different types of binging behavior, that binge watchers often view certain content out-of-order, and that binge watching is not a consistent behavior among our users. These insights and our findings have application in VOD revenue generation, consumer health applications, and customer retention analysis.

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cover image ACM Conferences
KDD '16: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
August 2016
2176 pages
ISBN:9781450342322
DOI:10.1145/2939672
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 13 August 2016

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Author Tags

  1. binge watching
  2. censored poisson regression
  3. mixture model

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KDD '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 66 of 1,115 submissions, 6%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,133 of 8,635 submissions, 13%

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