Relational Analysis of Users Viewing and Communication Behaviors in a Video-On-Demand Service with Social Networking Functions

The spread of Video on Demand (VOD) services is driving the creation of video viewing environments in which users can watch whatever they like, whenever they like. The recent appearance of social networking services (SNSs), moreover, is bringing big changes to the world of media by enabling anyone to become a disseminator of information. We are studying a platform that combines VOD and SNS to create “horizontal links” between program viewers, and to facilitate encounters with new programs. To investigate user behaviors on this platform, we built an SNS site called “teleda,” that enables program viewing by VOD, and conducted a large-scale, three-month verification trial with about 1000 participants. In this paper, we report on the relational analysis of teleda users’ viewing and communication behaviors. In order to clarify how the users’ communication structures relate to the viewing and posting behaviors on this system, we described the communication structures in terms of network structures, and ran a correlation analysis of network indicators and user behavior indicators such as viewing and posting. As a result, we revealed that relationships between the users’ communication structures, viewing behaviors, and posting actions are characteristics of each program’s genre.