A First Look at User Switching Behaviors Over Multiple Video Content Providers.

Watching videos from multiple content providers (CP) has become prevalent. For individual CPs, understanding user video consumption patterns among CPs is critical for improving on-site user experience and CP's opportunity of success. In this paper, based on a two-month dataset recording 9 million users' 269 million video viewing requests over 6 most popular video CPs in China, we provide a first look at users' video consumption and switching behaviors across different CPs. We find that rarely do active video watchers stick to one single CP. When users switch from one CP to another, they are more likely to switch to larger CPs with more videos.