Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):

For Wiki Loves Broadcast, a campaign based on the cooperation with public broadcasters in Germany, Switzerland, the UK, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and so on, we require metrics for videos on Commons – i.e. a tool that tracks video file requests (rather than include instances where a video file is loaded on a page).

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):

Through the efforts of Wiki Loves Broadcast, hundreds of videos have already been released by public broadcasters in Germany and beyond (e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_by_Terra_X). Our partners keep asking us for reliable metrics on how often these videos were viewed in the Wikimedia projects.

For years, we have been using mvc.toolforge.org developed by Amir Sarabadani which is based on the mediaviews API, thinking that it would show the actual view count of videos uploaded to Commons (and in many cases integrated in Wikipedia articles). We have since learned that it actually measures something a lot closer to page views (of the articles these videos have been integrated in) and is therefore not fit for purpose for our cooperation with public broadcasters.

Metrics for video views are essential to Wiki Loves Broadcast, however. They are the key incentive we have in convincing public broadcasters to openly license their work by proving to them that sharing their work freely can help them broaden their audiences and fulfil their public mandate.

Through internal discussions at WMDE we believe that this metric could be derived from the base webrequest data where video open events are recorded. The accuracy of this data is not the best as sometimes video opens are fired more than once. The data would allow for distinct devices (user agent x IP hashes) that have opened a given video within a given period of interest (day, month, etc).

Benefits (why should this be implemented?):

If we were to have a reliable metric on video views, not only would this significantly help the Wiki Loves Broadcast campaign, but it would bolster all GLAM cooperations. The need in the community (as this Wish shows, for instance) and in the movement at large exists.