Slashdot Mirror
Users Abandon Ship If Online Video Quality Is Not Up To Snuff, Says Study
An anonymous reader writes "The first large scientific study of how people respond to poor video quality on the Internet paints a picture of ever rising user expectations and the willingness to abandon ship if those expectations are not met (PDF). Some nuggets: 1) Some users are willing to wait for no more than 2 seconds for a video to start playing, with each additional second adding 6% to the abandonment rate. 2) Users with good broadband connectivity expect faster video load times and are even more impatient than ones on mobile devices. 3) Users who experience video freezing watch fewer minutes of the video than someone who does not experience freezing. If a video freezes for 1% of its total play time, 5% less of its total play time is watched, on average. 4) Users who experience failures when they try to play videos are less likely to return to the same website in the future. Big data was analyzed (260+ million minutes of video) and some cool new data analysis techniques used."
How do I get a job there?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
"If a video freezes for 1% of its total play time, 5% less of its total play time is watched, on average."
no shit, cause it pisses you off to sit there watching a fuzzy video of a ZX Spectrum game that the asshat somehow encoded and uploaded at 20480P and is hosted by blip
so passenger ships shouldn't get dodgy video playback equipment, cause people might jump overboard, even if its freezing?
I guess I should read the article, huh..
260,000,000 minutes of watched video is less than 1 day of youtube viewing (500 years per day)
Take note, Slashdot.
People don't keep using things that are broken, says latest scientific study from the Romero Institute. Professor Obvious, chair of the Three Kinds of Lies committee, said today that it was a shocking discovery. Many businesses have for years been selling things that are intentionally broken and assuming that people would simply keep buying them despite alternatives being available. Obvious has been nominated for an igNobel prize for his work, and says future studies may even uncover the precise mechanics behind why people continue to not use things that don't work.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
1) State something even more obvious than "the sky is blue," "water is wet," and "Slashdot polls don't have enough CowboyNeal options" combined.
2) Back up (1) with equations and graphs with lots of symbols last seen in calculus class.
3) ???
4) Profit!
This describes my YouTube experience every other day or so.
The metrics mentioned aren't really about video quality, which I tend to think of as things like the resolution, encoding artifacts, sound/video sync, etc. These are more about the video player functioning correctly, at any quality of video: that it starts playing the video soon after the user hits "play", and it doesn't drop out during the middle of playing. That's a kind of video quality, sure, but it's closer to "I stopped watching b/c the damn player didn't work" vs. "I stopped watching b/c the video's quality was too low".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
5) Users bail when the video loads and it's a commercial that can not be skipped.
Because unwanted, unskippable commercials are exactly like a pause before the video starts equal to the number of seconds the commercial plays. (See (1).)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So what if this was Netflix?
I always make a download of any video I watch, and I watch it during download. Firstly, I don't see anything frozen, except EOF, of course. Secondly, I live in Russia. In Soviet Russia, TV watches YOU! - and I cannot be sure that the video I see today will be available tomorrow. And the last: Both Flash and Virii are NOT available for platform I use, so I have no choice except migration to Windows.
I skip all videos with ads
Are there major-studio feature films without any sort of product placement anymore?
The most obnoxious buzz word out there currently.
They say it's impatience, but if you're on a broadband connection and you're used to videos starting to play in less than 2 seconds, then when it drags out you just assume something's wrong and you move on, possibly to go back to it later. How is that impatience?
10. "You don't have Flash 10.7 installed and need to upgrade to Flash 10.7" when you're running Flash 11.x
9. Embedded ads
8. 'special' video players (I'm looking at you ABC)
7. Video freeze during play due to lack of server response
6. Sound but no video
5. Video but no sound
4. Incompatible video formats
3. Video resolution inappropriate to the method of delivery...either way too high or way too low
2. Websites that insist on posting useless bandwidth-hogging 'talking head' videos rather than posting a simple photo and a text summary.
1. Digital Rights Management and all its limitations
Personally, I bail when the content is a video. Give me back my plain text internet, please.
Videos are such a waste of time.
I could have told you this without an expensive study - the results are exactly what I would have expected.
But will management listen to this study or will they continue to live in fantasy land where people actually like their poor service and advertising?
But the reality is that page loads have become slower, not only due to large number of ads, but a non responsive and evidently critically maimed Google Analytics. Yet despite these issues, user still go to web pages and wait.
So my question is what is really going on here and why do we care. If these video delays are not going to effect advertising, probably no one cares, just like no one cares that google analytics regularly cause web pages to hang. And a site is not advertising, then what is the issue if a random user bails.
Speed and reliability is a part of the design compromise. Certainly those who want to sell bandwidth and speed are going to say that those are most important, but they really aren't.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Have gnu, will travel.
People abandon videos that don't play, big surprise. This has nothing to do with poor video quality. Experience tells users that if it's going to lag at the beginning it's probably going to lag the way through. Seems lke more short attention span than demanding quality expectations. It's surfing useless entertainment. These users aren't trying to watch something that their life depends on. Laggy video is not entertaining, so you switch it off. This isn't much of a scientific study. Anyone who publishes their video on a stats based player, such as brightcove are used to these abandonment stats.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Simply press pause and wait for the video to load. That's how I watch all my videos.
Streaming simply does not work. It's not a bandwidth issue, it's that the flash-based video players involved are crap and can't do buffer management or seeking properly.
I have never seen a video on slashdot cause they don't play
but I came back
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
In other news, researchers have found that when people take a sip of beer and it tastes like sh*t, they drink less.
Humans. Always stating the obvious.
Users who know that making something of good quality is possible are not going to accept worse quality at the same price.
I am absolutely shocked at this revelation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reddit's too PC what with its high population of liberal college kiddies. Sounds more like either a glory-days former /b/tard or a 9gagger.
They're not accounting for the 10 times a day I bail on a page because I DON'T WANT TO WATCH THEIR STUPID VIDEO AT ALL.
I watch a lot of videos when I'm "shopping for presents," and I have to agree with the findings of this study.
But the again, I usually never watch the entire video anyway, and I never actually buy anything either. Odd.
I really hate video services that won't let me pause the video and download slowly. My home internet is a rather unreliable wifi signal, and if I want to watch something while it's being finicky I like to pause it for a while and let the video player catch up. Certain video services (I'm looking at you Comedy Central) only download a small amount of the video in advance and it stutters so badly that I just close it and go do something else.
I don't really understand the reasoning behind that decision either. I'll still watch the stinking ads, just let me download it in peace!
So in short, We want TV Quality Video.
Not so much news. If the video is choppy or looks bad, we tend to not want to watch it.
There is the people who called Color TV a fad. However its success was in the fact that the Color TV didn't come with a bunch of disadvantages, It was better to have color vs. Black and White. Now with Internet Video. There are advantages to it. However Lag and Quality are major disadvantages. And will not catch on unless both are resolved.
In many cases in both Lag and Quality have improved with advancements in network speed combined with better quality data compression, However still the load times means we need to invest into watching something vs. the old flipping through channels, to see what is on and if it catches you attention.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I would rather pause the video until the whole video is buffered than have a choppy video with a crappy resolution. However, some sites in their infinite wisdom will only buffer the first five seconds or not let you buffer at all. If they give me an option to download the video for later viewing that would be the ideal solution. Embed your crappy ads and I wouldn't care, because I will be able to watch the video I wanted in the first place in all it's glory.
Been there done that. I now actively avoid video content on the internet. For instance, if I'm on Google news or some such, some of the news links lead to video content. Back when I clicked them, 80% - 90% of the time I'd have to watch an ad, or dismiss a banner at the bottom, or have another unrelated window automatically open. OR, the video would require some obscure codec, would freeze or fail to load, or the link would be dead - whatever. Maybe a tenth of the time I'd actually get the news story I wanted, as I expected.
Now, it's text stories for me, exclusively. If I accidentally click a video link, I close it as soon as ANY of the above begins.
I can endure product placement if it doesn't hold up the film.
Consider the film The Wizard (1989). Does the non-stop display of Nintendo products in that film "hold up the film"?
Notably the "blue people syndrome". Incidentally, it also allows the playback of 10bit content, if you manage to find a site serving those.
In any case, Adobe is at fault for the lousy "hardware" support.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Akamai Technologies who sells services to speed up your video streaming funds a study that shows speeding up your video delivery will bring in more repeat customers. Imagine that.
I skimmed through the PDF to see what it had but I'm sure there was just as a lot of data NOT included in report as well.