An Analysis Of The Younow Live Streaming Platform

Video streaming platforms like Twitch.tv or YouNow have attracted the attention of both users and researchers in the last few years. Users increasingly adopt these platforms to share user-generated videos while researchers study their usage patterns to learn how to provide better and new services.In this paper, we focus on the YouNow platform and show the results of an analysis of its traffic patterns and other characteristics. To perform this analysis, we have collected YouNow usage patterns for 85994 users over a period of about one month.Our results show that YouNow's characteristics are in part equal to and in part different from those of other video streaming platforms. Like on You Tube or Twitch.tv, for instance, few YouNow videos attract most of the view requests. On the other side, YouNow sessions are notably shorter than Twitch.tv ones. We believe the observation of these similarities and differences to be crucial to inform the design and implementation of better upcoming video streaming services.