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."

Comments

Re:If a video freezes

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me ask you this, sir... How old are you? Because your post implies that you are 14.

so passenger ships..

[jasontheking]

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..

Re:so passenger ships..

[Anonymous Coward]

It hit a digital iceberg. But since the bit rate was slow and the codecs were primitive (it was still 1912 after all), the iceberg was all jagged. Due to a couple of lost packets, the bulkheads didn't get assembled completely. Oh and some asshole damaged a router that connected the forward and aft parts of the ship when he was screwing some chick in a car. Naturally, the ship split into two smaller LANs. By then the quality of the streaming Waterworld movie went to shit and people started jumping off the ship to save their sanity (though arguably, this was an impossible task). Kate Winslet got naked at some point, but since she didn't show much, everybody on the ship started searching for their porn elsewhere. This caused the data center to overheat. Wisely, the captain scuttled the ship to provide additional cooling. The End.

Re:Pfft video

[michaelbuddy]

Agreed, I would much rather read the transcripts to x-rated films than watch them. Way better.