What's on TV: A large scale quantitative characterisation of modern broadcast video content

Video databases, used for benchmarking and evaluating the performance of new video technologies, should represent the full breadth of consumer video content. The parameterisation of video databases using low-level features has proven to be an effective way of quantifying the diversity within a database. However, without a comprehensive understanding of the importance and relative frequency and of these features in the content people actually consume, the utility of such information is limited. Here, we present a large-scale analysis of programming on BBC One and CBeebies, the most popular television channels in the United Kingdom for adults and children, respectively. Twenty video features are extracted from almost three thousand television programmes shown throughout 2015 before principal components analysis is used to identify just five factors representing the most variation. The meaning and relative significance of these five factors together with the shape of their frequency distributions represent highly valuable information for researchers wanting to model the diversity of modern consumer content in representative video databases.