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Users Abandon Ship If Online Video Quality Is Not Up To Snuff, Says Study

Posted by Soulskill on from the make-a-resolution-for-higher-resolution dept.

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."

7 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. so passenger ships.. by jasontheking · · Score: 5, Funny

    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..

    1. Re:so passenger ships.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  2. less about quality, and more about functioning by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Five... by roc97007 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Top 10 Online Video Complaints... by dtjohnson · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Top 10 Online Video Complaints... by xetovss · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You forgot to put this on your list: Videos skip and pause when fully buffered . I am not sure what is the actual cause for it is but something causes it, even on a 2.8GHz Core2Duo w/ 8GB of memory with Win 7 64bit I get that a lot especially with youtube sometimes with others.

  5. Pfft video by megrims · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Personally, I bail when the content is a video. Give me back my plain text internet, please.

    Videos are such a waste of time.