Understanding the evolution of multimedia content in the Internet through BitTorrent glasses
This work addresses the need for Internet players like ISPs and CDNs to understand multimedia content trends for cost-effective infrastructure adaptation, though it is incremental as it applies existing analysis methods to new data.
The paper analyzed the evolution of multimedia content on BitTorrent by examining availability, popularity, size, and user feedback across categories using a dataset of over 160k contents and 185M download sessions from 2009 to 2012, finding trends that can help ISPs and platforms optimize infrastructure.
Today's Internet traffic is mostly dominated by multimedia content and the prediction is that this trend will intensify in the future. Therefore, main Internet players, such as ISPs, content delivery platforms (e.g. Youtube, Bitorrent, Netflix, etc) or CDN operators, need to understand the evolution of multimedia content availability and popularity in order to adapt their infrastructures and resources to satisfy clients requirements while they minimize their costs. This paper presents a thorough analysis on the evolution of multimedia content available in BitTorrent. Specifically, we analyze the evolution of four relevant metrics across different content categories: content availability, content popularity, content size and user's feedback. To this end we leverage a large-scale dataset formed by 4 snapshots collected from the most popular BitTorrent portal, namely The Pirate Bay, between Nov. 2009 and Feb. 2012. Overall our dataset is formed by more than 160k content that attracted more than 185M of download sessions.