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.
Just One More: Modeling Binge Watching Behavior
Just One More: Modeling Binge Watching Behavior
Related Content
To work at scale, a complete image indexing system comprises two components: An inverted file index to restrict the actual search to only a subset that should contain most of the items relevant to the query; An approximate distance computation mechanism to rapidly scan these lists. While supervised deep learning has recently enabled improvements to the latter, t…
This article presents an empirical study that investigated and compared two “big data” text analysis methods: dictionary-based analysis, perhaps the most popular automated analysis approach in social science research, and unsupervised topic modeling (i.e., Latent Dirichlet Allocation [LDA] analysis), one of the most widely used algorithms in the field of compute…
The ability of multimedia data to attract and keep people’s interest for longer periods of time is gaining more and more importance in the fields of information retrieval and recommendation, especially in the context of the ever growing market value of social media and advertising. In this chapter we introduce a benchmarking framework (dataset and evaluation too…
Webinar /Jun 2024
Blog Post /Jul 2025
Blog Post /Jun 2025
Blog Post /Jun 2025