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."
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..
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.
Ah, good, I'm glad someone already mentioned this. Big did not deserve to be italicized there not only because 260 million minutes of video isn't "that much" (!) in terms of internet streaming viewers, but the statistics aren't really based on number of minutes of video analyzed... the main statistics are more about viewership and certain events (video startup, video freezing), which could be surrounded by hours of uninteresting video time that didn't really contribute to some of the metrics.
Netflix has, what, 20+ million individual viewers per month? 10 hours a piece isn't hard to imagine. As the parent pointed out youtube is much larger than that.
It's still very interesting analytics. it's not always the size that matters with "big" data. But let's not get carried away with the italics now people... this way madness lies.
Professor Obvious, chair of the Three Kinds of Lies committee, said today that it was a shocking discovery.
Could you find a new hobby besides posting here? The purpose of studies is not just to confirm knowledge or common sense suspicions, but to quantify that knowledge. There is no way in fuck that Professor Obvious knows a priori that an additional 1 second delay will cause 6% of viewers to flee. Professor Brilliant might know this, but that ain't me and it ain't you.
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.
Look, no one gives a flying fuck about YouTube videos of Fluffy and Buffy if we're talking about cute poodles. Now, if we are talking about two-legged bitches, that's another issue.
Let's be serious here, we're talking about porn.
Seriously, it's hard to get hard with choppy video of the "old in-and-out". For the total turn-on, we require high quality video and a nice transfer rate. Seriously.
I mean, how am I going to get my "freak" on with stilted choppy bad video? I might as well go down to the local "Adult Entertainment Shop" and buy a CD or check into a booth (with complementary kitchen towel roll (COSTCO) and a sticky floor)...
Come on people, good video and "personal satisfaction" go, er, hand in hand...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Well I think that video streaming sites would be VERY interested in this data. Probably interested enough to at the very least partially fund the research.
Hmmm, Thinking about it, probably any type of retailer would be interested in data like this. It's a quantifiable amount of time before loss of interest, not just "customers hate waiting".
Another interesting tidbit from this study, it's probably a bad idea to put an ad at the very beginning of the video ( for ad supported sites ) since most ads are more than two seconds long. This may seem counter intuitive since if you show the ad BEFORE the video you shouldn't have to interrupt the actual video - like hulu does it - and you would think users would prefer getting it out of the way first so as not to be interrupted. Then again that breaks the traditional commercial model that people are used to from television and may take them out of their comfort zones.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
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...
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.