Streaming Media

The final paper in this ANZCA 2017 session is presented by Caroline Fisher, whose focus is on Australian politicians' approaches to bypassing the scrutiny of the parliamentary press gallery. This is based on a set of 87 interviews with key media actors from the Howard era, including the former Prime Minister himself, as well as on an analysis of the social media activities of five Australian political leaders and interviews with their press secretaries.

Politicians have always sought to control the information flows that cover their activities; through social media they have become more easily able to bypass conventional journalistic …

The second speaker in this AoIR 2016 session is Fabio Giglietto, who shifts our focus to Netflix. This was launched in Italy in October 2015, and has become especially popular with young adults in the 18-24 age range. There has been a growth in the practice of binge-watching TV series as part of this adoption process, too – and other online video providers have also become available in Italy, along with unauthorised sources.

Italian users have been especially attracted by the content discovery features that Netflix provides – especially the algorithmic recommendations of new shows to watch based on …

The next WebSci 2016 paper session starts with a presentation by Pei Zhang, which introduces what she calls the Content-Linking-Context model, or CLC. The context for this is legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the European e-Commerce Directive, as well as various national legislation in the EU.

The DMCA requires services providers to take down content on request expeditiously, even without verification of copyright infringement claims, and providers such as Google and Dailymotion are known to act on such requests, but there is little information about the criteria they use to vet requests. Can automated systems …

The next paper in this WebSci 2016 session is presented by Mariana Arantes, whose interest is in the matching of video ads to YouTube videos. Such ads are displayed before some YouTube videos, and they can often be stopped after a set number of seconds. How do users consume these ads? How does their popularity change over time? What is the relationship between videos and ads, and does a better content match mean that ads are more likely to be watched all the way through?

It is difficult to investigate this given the poor range of data provided by the …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Nicole Hentrich, who shifts our focus to the problem of geoblocking in accessing televisual content online. Such Internet content is still controlled on a geographic basis; the Internet is thus not experienced the same by everyone, on both an individual, regional, and national basis.

Even when new services enter a local market – as Netflix did in Australia earlier this year – these issues do not go away. Netflix became officially available in Australia in March 2015, though some 200,000 subscribers had already been using it through VPNs – more than …

The next speaker at this AoIR 2013 panel is T.L. Taylor, focussing here on spectatorship in gaming. The mix of playing and watching has always been central to gaming as a social activity, but game studies has always privileged the hands on the controller; spectatorship has traditionally also relied on physical co-presence (e.g. at gaming championships).

But now there are sites like Twitch, which enable gamers to make their private play public as a livestream, and even to make money in doing so, as a spinoff from JustIn.tv. The site currently has some 600 unique broadcasters per month …