Comparative analysis of online 2-D and 3-D video sharing

In recent years, online video sharing services have been growing rapidly. Nowadays, online video sharing becomes one of the most popular ways to produce and consume media. Moreover, with growing 3-D technologies, the interest to 3-D technologies has increased and it becomes easier to produce, share, and consume 3-D media on Internet. This paper investigates 3-D media production and consumption patterns in comparison to 2-D media to get insight to the online 3-D media ecosystem by analyzing metadata and statistics of 10,597,268 2-D videos and 50,972 3-D videos in YouTube. It is shown that the general production and consumption patterns of 2-D and 3-D videos are similar, but they have differences in uploading patterns, video length, category, and user participations. From these differences, we identify distinguished features of online 3-D video sharing. Our findings will serve as valuable information in technical and commercial aspects of contents sharing services.