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."
"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
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.
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
Ever notice that the Advertisements load faster and are of better quality (DPI) many times than the video?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Personally, I bail when the content is a video. Give me back my plain text internet, please.
Videos are such a waste of time.
In fact, I have! I live in China and tried to use Hulu through a VPN. The actual shows SUCKED(lag, stutter, failure of the player to transition from ads back to the regular show) but the ads never skipped a beat.
Been using pirate bay and have never looked back.
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.
Not exactly. What I notice about ads is that they often try to load in a higher quality than the video I'm watching, then stutter and choke on the crappy bandwidth that is the best I can get where I live. Or they try to do something fancy and interactive, and hang or crash my browser. And then I wonder again why I'm not just downloading my content from the pirate bay...
You write this as if Google Analytics is the only ad service out there.
Google Analytics is pretty responsive. Very responsive if you compare to a lot of other ad services.
Another thing that has bogged down browsers over the years is the sheer amount of JS that dwarfs the amount of HTML on a web page, leading to an arms race to see who wins - the web page devs or the browser JS engine devs. The engine devs lose most of the time, and when the rare occasion happens that there is a breakthrough in JS speed, web devs tack on even more crap, because they can. Add to this the ridiculous amount of JS that ad services and trackers throw in, and you have a fucking nightmare of inefficiency. Adblock is the only real way to combat this for now.
But this has nothing to do with video playback once the stream is started. Once the ads are loaded or blocked locally, the video itself should play and the server should keep the buffer full for the player, which often times fails. QOS for video is atrocious from the viewer's POV. While it's amazing that Youtube is able to stream as many videos as it does without completely imploding, this does not matter to the viewer. What matters to the viewer is that the video starts playing, and then a minute or so into it, the buffer goes away, because the video server forgot all about the stream and "will get back to it in a bit." Then the viewer bails unless it's really compelling and he hits pause and waits for the buffer to fill again, or the viewer(a very small percentage of the total) uses a downloader to save the file locally and later viewing, which I do sometimes (I do this for videos on wimp.com).
From the viewer's POV, video on the Internet sucks for the most part. It's not good enough for non-casual watching and is unlikely to be so for quite some time unless infrastructure becomes better.
--
BMO
No, in fact I see the opposite on Hulu quite often. The advertisements are of such poor quality I sometimes wonder how Hulu tricked companies into paying for the placement.
The problem is more fundamental.
The internet is fundamentally a best effort statistically switched packet network. No delivery guarantees. No particular order of delivery.
Video uses temporal compression and requires timely delivery for a stable reconstruction of the video. Drop a master frame and all hell breaks loose. At a low level this is incompatible with the design of the internet.
Throw in the fact that people are conditioned to a highly reliable delivery system (cable TV) with dedicated bandwidth and you are simply going to find that they are not going to tolerate the performance profile you are going to get trying to cram a high bandwidth stream down a statistically switched pipe.
No
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.