Do Androids Watch Videos of Electric Sheep? How Bots React to Web Video

Philip K. Dick's science fiction story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" explored the difficulty in distinguishing living beings from machines, a problem that extends to online video consumption by web crawlers and scrapers. Crawlers are designed to follow links in web content and scan large sections of the internet, while scrapers download entire web pages and their resources. These tools can have a significant impact on video playback metrics, leading to false positives for error rates and other issues. To address this problem, Mux developed an anomaly detection system that automatically finds anomalies in error rates for individual video titles and across entire customer sites. By examining video-view attributes such as browser user-agent strings, IP address blacklists, and data center ranges, the company can identify crawlers and exclude them from their metrics. This helps improve the accuracy of performance metrics for video playback and ensures that genuine errors are not overlooked.