Abstract
The amount of online video content available to us is rapidly increasing. Understanding how people are seeking and consuming this content is a prerequisite for providing good services. This paper investigates if and how log data can be used to identify information seeking behaviour in the context of online TV. A study was conducted where 27 participants performed given tasks on two Norwegian online TV sites. The participants were between 20 and 25 years old and all of them were moderate or heavy users of online TV. Tasks that require both scanning and searching of information were given. Four main types of behaviour were identified in the qualitative data: goal-directed search, goal-directed meta-data search followed by consumption, goal-directed search of meta-data and video, and explorative behaviour. Detailed log event files were compared to self-reported data describing user's activities (feedback collected at the end of each task and interviews) and screen captures. Our results indicate that the following four variables in the log files: number of (short navigation sequence, short video watching sequence) pairs, frequency of video search actions, percentage of time spent on sequences of navigate actions, and percentage of time spent on watching videos can be used to characterise the four types of behaviour. This work extends previous research on usage of log files in describing user's behaviour by providing simple way of characterizing behaviour of online TV users. In particular, the results might be useful in supporting the personalisation of online TV services.