Challenges on the Journey to Co-Watching YouTube

Abstract

In order to better understand social aspects of the short-form video watching experience, we investigated the journey to cowatching, from searching and discovering content, to choosing and experiencing videos with others. After identifying, through a large-scale survey, some of the most typical situations that bring people to YouTube, we deployed a one weeklong diary study with 12 participants in which they performed a set of frequent video tasks at their leisure, half by themselves, and half with someone else. Following the diary study, we had participants reenact the diary study tasks remotely with the experimenter. We observed that users face multiple challenges on the journey to co-watching a video. They must share a device designed for an individual, use different methods for selecting videos than when by themselves, negotiate or turn-take in order to make a decision, and potentially watch a video that they do not enjoy. Along this journey, users must engage in impression management to consider how their choices might make them appear to others. We present design recommendations for remote and collocated co-watching to improve the social video watching experience.

YouTube needs

“…Participants were rarely alone (10.5%); mutual connection motivations were mostly addressed in a co-watching experience with a group (43.9%) or a pair (42.1%). In agreement with related work [16], we observed that negotiation on a video to watch can take significant time and be detrimental to the experience, e.g. "Took too long and we lost interest".…”

“…They could also voluntarily fill the survey at any time to report a video watch without waiting for a probe. By using this method, we collected information about participants' video watches at close proximity to when the experience happened (usually not more than a few hours after the event), thus making it more likely to capture an infrequent motivation in comparison to using single surveys [13,3,7,16]. Figure 1 shows examples of the ESM notification and probing survey.…”

“…Research related to such motivations was focused on many real-world applications. Examples included studies on synchronization requirements for co-watching videos [4], guidance to video creators for making shareable videos [12], development of new methods for editing and sharing panoramic videos [10], and recommendations for easing the challenges of co-watching videos on YouTube [16]. Research conducted on social context [4,10,12,16] was very focused on specific applications of the understanding of motivations to connect.…”

“…Examples included studies on synchronization requirements for co-watching videos [4], guidance to video creators for making shareable videos [12], development of new methods for editing and sharing panoramic videos [10], and recommendations for easing the challenges of co-watching videos on YouTube [16]. Research conducted on social context [4,10,12,16] was very focused on specific applications of the understanding of motivations to connect. Unfortunately, these studies were not intended to provide descriptions of a taxonomy of viewer motivations; they each focused on their respective aspects of user needs for companionship.…”

“…Previous research typically focused on describing specific content areas [9,13] and experiences [4,10,11,12,14,15,16,17] of viewer motivations. Important frameworks for understanding viewer motivations were developed [3,7,8,13].…”