Video delivery over the Internet is becoming increasingly popular and comes in many flavors, such as Live Streaming and Video-on-Demand. In the recent years, many peer to peer solutions for Live Streaming and VoD have been proposed as opposed to the centralized solutions that are not scalable due to the high bandwidth requirements. In all existing solutions, Live Streaming and VoD have traditionally and artificially been considered as separate technical problems. We propose an integrated Live Streaming with VoD system that offers the potential for users to watch live TV with short delays. In Live Streaming, peers are interested in the content that is being generated live by the streaming source, unlike VoD in which peers are interested in the content that has been generated from the beginning of the streaming. In this manner, Live nodes can contribute to VoD nodes and send them the pieces they have downloaded since their joining time. In this work, we demonstrate that our system, called Live-VoD, brings out the possibility of having both types of nodes in one system, each being served based on their interest. We propose a P2P Live-VoD protocol for overlay construction based on peer’s upload bandwidth that is built on top of the Gradient topology and an innovative algorithm based on the number of pieces peers can contribute to each other. We also propose an innovative stochastic algorithm for data dissemination based on the rareness of the piece and the requesting node’s download position. Our experiments show that Live-VoD is decentralized, scalable and self-organizing. We also show that even when most of the nodes in the system are VoDs, all VoD nodes regardless of their joining time, manage to download the whole movie with no assistance from the streaming source.

With the expansion of the Internet and an increasing fraction of consumers having broadband connections, more and more content is finding its way on-line. Video content is becoming one of the most popular types of media content on the Internet. Traditional media content providers, such as television networks, are placing their content on the Internet in order to gain a broader audience. On-demand websites such as kanal5play.se allow viewers to view the multimedia content they want at the time of their choice. While this gives viewers flexibility in their viewing, it creates resource problems for content providers. Statistics from Kanal5 AB show that, even with individual viewers requesting content when they want, there are still patterns in which multiple viewers watch the same content at the same time. This means there are correlations in the demand for content. With unicast distribution this leads to spikes in requirements for bandwidth to the viewers. These peaks lead to high costs for network and server resources to deliver the requested content, but these resources have low average utilization. This thesis project investigates how a content provider can make use of each viewer’s own resources to deliver content to other users using peer-to-peer techniques. The thesis evaluates what methods can be used in order to reduce the content provider’s resource requirements during peak hours by exploiting copies of contents that have already been delivered to viewers who requested this same content earlier. A prototype was made to evaluate the suggested design using Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI), which is built on top of the Transfer Control Protocol (TCP). Experiments show that an initial delay of several seconds is reached on a network with a simulated delay of 100ms, while a minimal initial delay was observed on a network with low delay, i.e. ideal conditions. The throughput results of the prototype show that the suggested solution is adequate for delivering on-demand content supplied by Kanal5 AB. However, the relatively poor startup performance of this solution argues for tuning the application to better work with the TCP protocol or to utilize another transport protocol - especially if the round-trip delay is large as TCP’s 3-way handshake and flow control algorithm limit the performance of the prototype system. / Med utbyggnaden av Internet och en ökande andel konsumenter med bredband, mer och mer innehåll hittar sin väg på nätet. Video innehåll blir en av de mest populära typer av media på Internet. Innehållsleverantörer som använder sig av traditionella medier, exempelvis tv-nät, lägger sitt innehåll på Internet för att nå en bredare publik. On-demand webbplatser som kanal5play.se låter tittarna se multimediainnehållet de vill, när de vill. Även om detta ger tittarna flexibilitet i sitt tittande så skapar det resursproblem för innehållsleverantörer. Statistik från Kanal5 AB visar att även med enskilda tittare som begär innehåll när de vill så finns det fortfarande mönster där flera tittare tittar på samma innehåll på samma gång. Detta innebär att det finns samband i efterfrågan på innehåll. Med unicast distribution leder detta till sprikar i krav på bandbredd till tittarna. Dessa toppar leda till höga kostnader för nät-och server för att leverera det efterfrågade innehållet, men dessa resurser har låga genomsnittliga utnyttjanden. Detta examensarbete undersöker hur en innehållsleverantör kan använda sig av varje tittares egna resurser för att leverera innehåll till andra användare med hjälp av peer-to-peer-teknik. Avhandlingen utvärderar vilka metoder kan användas för att minska innehållsleverantörens resursbehov under rusningstid genom att utnyttja kopior av innehåll som redan har levererats till tittarna som begärde samma innehåll tidigare. En prototyp gjordes för att utvärdera den föreslagna konstruktionen med Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI), som är byggd ovanpå Transfer Control Protocol (TCP). Experiment visar en uppstartsfördröjning på flera sekunder på ett nätverk med en simulerad fördröjning på 100 ms, samtidigt som en minimal uppstartsfördöjning observerades på ett nätverk med låg fördröjning, dvs idealiska förhållanden. Resultaten för genomströmningshastigheten hos prototypen visar att den föreslagna lösningen är tillräcklig för att leverera on-demand innehåll som tillhandahålls av Kanal5 AB. De relativt dåliga uppstartsresultaten för denna lösning säger dock att förbättringar bör göras i applikationen så att den kan arbeta bättre med TCP protokollet, eller att ett annat protokoll används - särskilt om nätverksfördröjningen är stor, då TCP:s 3-vägs handskakning och flödeskontroll algoritm begränsar prestandan hos det föreslagna systemet.

Background: With great developments within technology and internet provision, subscription video on demand (SVoD) has made a remarkable entrance with a competitiveness which has resulted in a shift in the television industry (Noh, 2020). The user pays a monthly fee and gets access to a platform which offers a library of content. The escalated competition among SVoD services (Pennington, 2020) has resulted in businesses to re-evaluate how users and potential users' perceived value of the service and the resulting effects may have on their business. Problem Discussion: Perceived value is seen to be the most critical determinant of willingness-to-pay and whether an individual makes the decision to purchase (Chang, Wang & Yang, 2009; Ulaga & Chacour, 2001). Empirical studies that focus on the role of perceived values in the purchase decision in a digital context have been conducted in various fields, such as, freemium services (Hamari, Hanner & Koivisto, 2020) and music streaming (Guerra & Fernandes, 2019) or mixing various streaming apps together (Oyedele & Simpson, 2018). While previous research has studied perceived values’ role in the decision-making process in streaming segments, almost none of them has explored its role specifically in SVoD services. Furthermore, no previous studies have explored the temporal dimension of value, which has shown to be of great importance in technology-based self-services (Heinonen, 2004).   Purpose: This study explores the elements that mostly influence users’ perceived values when making the decision to subscribe to a SVoD service. The purpose is to investigate the market of subscription video on demand services and better understand what users perceive as valuable, as well as how and why these influence their purchasing decision. Building on this understanding, we develop a framework that illuminates the user's decision-making process when subscribing to a SVoD service.  Method: An inductive qualitative case study methodology was adopted, building on semi-structured in-depth interviews with ten SVoD service users. The interviewed users were between the ages of 25-32.  Conclusion: The researchers concluded that users of SVoD services emphasize four perceived values when subscribing, these are: emotional, social, convenience and epistemic. These values were thereafter categorized into perceived immediate and future values of subscription. When an individual is in the process of subscribing, the person weighs the temporal dimensions of perceived immediate and future values towards the price of subscription, which equates in the perceived value. The user will select the service which offers the highest perceived value.

As digital technologies rapidly evolve, traditional television is being disrupted by the development of more devices, screens, and content. Over-the-top television [OTT TV] is replacing linear TV at a growing rate. A majority of consumers of over-the-top content are found in the generational cohort, Generation Z. As true digital natives, this generation is comfortable navigating a variety of online TV platforms and devices, while also being more susceptible to short attention-span and information overload. It is therefore necessary to understand how this emerging cohort makes choices in a TV landscape that is becoming increasingly overloaded with new content. The purpose of this study is to understand which user interface components Generation Z takes into consideration when selecting content in OTT TV. Multiple methodologies were selected to investigate these media habits. Think-aloud usability testing and interview determined Generation Z’s natural media behavior while browsing OTT content. Online survey data was collected from a broader sample, comparing Generation Z and Generation Y. It was discovered that both generations have similar behaviors in which user interface components influence content choice. The research also revealed trends in which components are important to Generation Z and why. This research is the first step to making informed and data-driven decisions in the design and implementation of OTT TV platforms for Generation Z, thus lessening cognitive overload and creating optimal user experiences. / Med den digitala teknologins snabba utveckling, förändras traditionell tv i och med inverkan av flera enheter, skärmar och innehåll. Over-the-top-tv [OTT-tv] ersätter linjär tv i en växande takt. Majoriteten av konsumenterna av over-the-top-innehåll finns inom en specifik generation, Generation Z. Som äkta digitala infödingar kan den här generationen lätt navigera ett flertal online-tv-plattformar och enheter, samtidigt som den har kort koncentrationsförmåga och är mer mottaglig för informationsöverbelastning. Det är därför nödvändigt att förstå hur denna växande grupp gör val i ett tv-landskap som blir alltmer överbelastat med nytt innehåll. Syftet med denna studie är att förstå vilka användargränssnitts-komponenter Generation Z tar hänsyn till när de väljer innehåll på OTT-tv. Flera metoder användes för att undersöka gruppens medievanor. Användbarhetstest och intervjuer avslöjade Generation Z: s naturliga beteende när de letar efter OTT-innehåll. Enkätundersökningsdata från en större grupp jämförde Generation Z och Generation Y. Det upptäcktes att båda generationerna har liknande beteenden där användargränssnitts-komponenter påverkar valet av innehåll. Forskningen visade också trender för vilka komponenter som är viktiga för Generation Z och varför. Den här forskningen är det första steget i att göra informerade och datadrivna beslut i design och implementering av OTT-tv-plattformar för Generation Z, vilket minskar den kognitiva överbelastningen och skapar optimala användarupplevelser.

Video-On-Demand (VOD) has appeared as an important technology for many multimedia applications such as news on demand, digital libraries, home entertainment, and distance learning. In its simplest form, delivery of a video stream requires a dedicated channel for each video session. This scheme is very expensive and non-scalable. To preserve server bandwidth, many users can share a channel using multicast. Two types of multicast have been considered. In a non-periodic multicast setting, users make video requests to the server; and it serves them according to some scheduling policy. In a periodic broadcast environment, the server does not wait for service requests. It broadcasts a video cyclically, e.g., a new stream of the same video is started every t seconds. Although, this type of approach does not guarantee true VOD, the worst service latency experienced by any client is less than t seconds. A distinct advantage of this approach is that it can serve a very large community of users using minimal server bandwidth. In VOD System it is desirable to provide the user with the video-cassette-recorder-like (VCR) capabilities such as fast-forwarding a video or jumping to a specific frame. This issue in the broadcast framework is addressed, where each video and its interactive version are broadcast repeatedly on the network. Existing techniques rely on data prefetching as the mechanism to provide this functionality. This approach provides limited usability since the prefetching rate cannot keep up with typical fast-forward speeds. In the same environment, end users might have access to different bandwidth capabilities at different times. Current periodic broadcast schemes, do not take advantage of high-bandwidth capabilities, nor do they adapt to the low-bandwidth limitation of the receivers. A heterogeneous technique is presented that can adapt to a range of receiving bandwidth capability. Given a server bandwidth and a range of different client bandwidths, users employing the proposed technique will choose either to use their full reception bandwidth capability and therefore accessing the video at a very short time, or using part or enough reception bandwidth at the expense of a longer access latency.

Peer to Peer (P2P) models are based on user altruism, wherein a user shares its content with other users in the pool and it also has an interest in the content of the other nodes. Most P2P systems in their current form are not fair in terms of the content served by a peer and the service obtained from swarm. Most systems suffer from free rider's problem where many high uplink capacity peers contribute much more than they should while many others get a free ride for downloading the content. This leaves high capacity nodes with very little or no motivation to contribute. Many times such resourceful nodes exit the swarm or don't even participate. The whole scenario is unfavorable and disappointing for P2P networks in general, where participation is a must and a very important feature. As the number of users increases in the swarm, the swarm becomes robust and scalable. Other important issues in the present day P2P system are below optimal Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of download time, end-to-end latency and jitter rate, uplink utilization, excessive cross ISP traffic, security and cheating threats etc. These current day problems in P2P networks serve as a motivation for present work. To this end, we present an efficient data distribution framework in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks for media streaming and file sharing domain. The experiments with our model, an alliance based peering scheme for media streaming, show that such a scheme distributes data to the swarm members in a near-optimal way. Alliances are small groups of nodes that share data and other vital information for symbiotic association. We show that alliance formation is a loosely coupled and an effective way to organize the peers and our model maps to a small world network, which form efficient overlay structures and are robust to network perturbations such as churn. We present a comparative simulation based study of our model with CoolStreaming/DONet (a popular model) and present a quantitative performance evaluation. Simulation results show that our model scales well under varying workloads and conditions, delivers near optimal levels of QoS, reduces cross ISP traffic considerably and for most cases, performs at par or even better than Cool-Streaming/DONet. In the next phase of our work, we focussed on BitTorrent P2P model as it the most widely used file sharing protocol. Many studies in academia and industry have shown that though BitTorrent scales very well but is far from optimal in terms of fairness to end users, download time and uplink utilization. Furthermore, random peering and data distribution in such model lead to suboptimal performance. Lately, new breed of BitTorrent clients like BitTyrant have shown successful strategic attacks against BitTorrent. Strategic peers configure the BitTorrent client software such that for very less or no contribution, they can obtain good download speeds. Such strategic nodes exploit the altruism in the swarm and consume resources at the expense of other honest nodes and create an unfair swarm. More unfairness is generated in the swarm with the presence of heterogeneous bandwidth nodes. We investigate and propose a new token-based anti-strategic policy that could be used in BitTorrent to minimize the free-riding by strategic clients. We also proposed other policies against strategic attacks that include using a smart tracker that denies the request of strategic clients for peer listmultiple times, and black listing the non-behaving nodes that do not follow the protocol policies. These policies help to stop the strategic behavior of peers to a large extent and improve overall system performance. We also quantify and validate the benefits of using bandwidth peer matching policy. Our simulations results show that with the above proposed changes, uplink utilization and mean download time in BitTorrent network improves considerably. It leaves strategic clients with little or no incentive to behave greedily. This reduces free riding and creates fairer swarm with very little computational overhead. Finally, we show that our model is self healing model where user behavior changes from selfish to altruistic in the presence of the aforementioned policies.

The presence of millions of interconnected personal computing devices has given rise to a new class of decentralized networking applications, which are loosely labeled as peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. These P2P applications leverage resources such as processing cycles, storage, content, and network bandwidth available to the user devices, which are also known as peers. A number of current systems - SETI@home, Napster, BitTorrent, and Pastry - are examples of these emerging P2P systems. To fully realize the potential of the peer-to-peer technology, there is a need to define and provide a set of core competencies, serving as the basic services upon which various peer-to-peer applications can be built on. Among these core competencies, this dissertation focuses on two fundamental services, which are search and delivery. In the first part of the dissertation, delivery techniques to support video-on-demand services in wireline and wireless P2P networks are investigated. Video services are considered due to two reasons. First, video services are the pivotal basis for many other multimedia applications. Second, it is challenging to provide on-demand video services due to asynchronous playback progresses at peers. The proposed techniques enable efficient video sharing between peers with asynchronous playback progresses, and maximize peer bandwidth utilization. In the second part of the dissertation, the problem of supporting continuous moving range queries in wireless mobile peer-to-peer networks is studied. Continuous moving range queries have a number of applications when a moving object wants to monitor its surrounding environment for a period of time. When a fixed network infrastructure is not available, wireless mobile peer-to-peer networks become a viable option to support the continuous query system. The proposed distributed solution ensures the accuracy of the query results under realistic assumptions, and incurs much less overhead than alternative solutions.

During the last 15 years, the film industry has undergone severe technological, cultural, and economic transformations initiated through online film distribution. Existing players need to adapt and innovate their business models to stay competitive. However, there is little knowledge about what players actually do in this respect. Since the film industry is of great economic and cultural importance, it is essential for researchers and managers alike to understand the transformations in the business models of film companies. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate which areas of the business models of Nordic film studios have been most affected by changes and how the studios have responded to these transformations. Based on a longitudinal, comparative case study of the companies SF Studios and Nordisk Film, the study reveals that distribution channels, revenue streams, margins, partner network, customer needs, and core offerings have changed the most. The main transformations can be seen in stronger partnerships and an increased focus on in-house production to serve the high demand for content, secure a content flow for distribution, and generate new revenues. / Under de senaste 15 åren har filmindustrin genomgått stora tekniska, kulturella och ekonomiska förändringar som inleddes av den digitala filmdistributionens uppkomst. För att förbli konkurrenskraftiga måste nuvarande aktörer anpassa och förnya sina affärsmodeller. Det finns dock lite kunskap om vad företagen faktiskt gör i detta avseende. Eftersom filmindustrin har ett stort ekonomiskt och kulturellt värde är det avgörande att förstå förändringar i filmbolagens affärsmodeller, både för forskare och ledare. Syftet med denna uppsats är därför att undersöka vilka delar av nordiska filmstudiors affärsmodeller som är mest drabbade av förändringar och hur studiorna har reagerat på detta. Baserat på en longitudinell, jämförande fallstudie av företagen SF Studios och Nordisk Film visar denna studie att distributionskanaler, intäkter, marginaler, partnernätverk, kundbehov och kärnutbud har förändrats mest. De huvudsakliga förändringarna visas i starkare partnerskap och ett ökat fokus på egen produktion, för att uppfylla den höga efterfrågan på innehåll, säkra ett innehållsflöde för distribution samt generera nya intäkter.

Sedan 2013 har allt fler börjat använda sig av streamingtjänster för film och TV på internet (Findahl,2014). I takt med att användningen ökar är det viktigt att tjänsterna är välutvecklade och lättillgängliga för användaren. I denna uppsats undersöker vi funktioner på de tre största Video on Demand-tjänsterna (VoD) i Sverige ur ett användarperspektiv. Med hjälp av befintliga teorier och litteratur diskuterar vi användarbarhet och genomför en områdesanalys av de utvalda VoD-tjänsterna. Utifrån analysen har vi gått vidare med tio funktioner för att avgränsa studien. Uppsatsen innehåller två metoder; fokus grupper och enkätundersökning. Resultatet från dessa metoder presenteras i en rankningslista som ska fungera som rekommendation till operatörerna. Slutsatsen som kan dras från resultatet är att en VoD-tjänst som har flera eller alla av funktioner från rankningslistan tillgängliga, kommer ge användare en betydligt bättre användarupplevelse på webbplatsen. / The development of streaming media services has rapidly evolved since 2013 (Findahl, 2014). As the usage of video on demand (VOD) services increases, it becomes more important that the services are well developed and accessible to its users. In this essay we study the functionality of the three most used VOD-services in Sweden, from a user perspective. Using existing theories and literature, we discussusability and conduct a field evaluation, analysing the three VOD services. Based on the conducted evaluation, we decided to move forward with ten features that, we found, were the most useful from a user perspective. It also helped delimit the study. The essay contains two research methods, a questionnaire survey and focus groups. The results from the study are presented in a ranking-list that will serve as a recommendation to the operators of the VOD services. The conclusion we made from the ranking-list is that a VOD service that take most of these functions into account will make for a better user experience.

The video streaming business has grown substantially during the last decades. To optimize the user experience in video streaming, it is important to know how the user satisfaction relates to the technical qualities for the video streaming services, such as bufferings and startup times.  The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a widely used management tool used in surveys to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. The users are categorized into three user groups based on a survey question. This thesis investigates whether it is possible to find correlations between the three user groups based on NPS ratings and measured technical qualities from video streams. Initial data exploring through information visualization suggested that the data should be separated into live streams and video-on-demand. Statistical analysis showed that the NPS user groups have no correlations to how long the users are watching the streams, nor to how long the video takes to start. The results showed, that the users watching live streams seem to be more sensitive to lower qualities than those watching video- on-demand. However, this could also be due to the fact that the measured technical qualities during live streams are generally lower. The buffering and the seek time proved to have correlations to the measured user satisfaction, but several other factors such as the actual video content could also have big impacts on the user’s ratings. The users which had experienced more buffering and longer seek times were more likely to rate the service with a lower score, than the average user. / Mängden videor som streamas över Internet har ökat väsentligt under de senaste årtiondena. För att kunna optimera upplevelsen för de som streamar videor är det viktigt för företagen som erbjuder dessa tjänster att veta hur kundnöjdheten relaterar till de tekniska egenskaperna. Dessa kan inkludera faktorer såsom buffring och starttider. Net Promoter Score (NPS) är ett verktyg som används inom många olika branscher för att mäta kundnöjdhet och lojalitet. Användarna delas in i tre grupper beroende på hur de svarar på en enkätfråga. Detta examensarbete undersöker huruvida det är möjligt att hitta korrelationer mellan kundnöjdhet baserad på de tre användargrupperna från NPS-verktyget och uppmätta tekniska kvaliteter från en streamingtjänst. Efter att inledande informationsvisualiseringar påvisade skillnader mellan live-strömmar och video-on-demand har dessa grupper hanterats separat. Statistisk analys visade att de tre NPS-grupperna inte har några korrelationer med starttiden eller hur länge användarna tittar på videor. Resultatet visade även att användarna som tittar på live-strömmar verkar vara känsligare för lägre tekniska kvaliteter än de som tittar på video-on-demand. Detta kan dock även bero på att de uppmätta tekniska egenskaperna under live-strömmarna generellt är lite lägre. Buffringen och söktiden visade sig ha samband med den uppmätta kundnöjdheten, men flera andra faktorer, såsom det faktiska videoinnehållet, kan också ha en inverkan på användarnas betyg. Användarna som hade upplevt mer buffring och längre söktider var mer benägna att ge tjänsten ett lägre betyg än den genomsnittliga användaren.