Users Abandon Ship If Online Video Quality Is Not Up To Snuff, Says Study 155
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."
Top 10 Online Video Complaints... (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
Re:Brilliant business model. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Romero Institute (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:Brilliant business model. (Score:4, Informative)
No [opera.com]
Re:Top 10 Online Video Complaints... (Score:4, Informative)
I had this issue with recent FF builds under Windows. With one simple change, it works as fine now as it did several years ago:
Tools > Options > Advanced > Use hardware acceleration. Uncheck* this. Press OK. Restart FF.
Done.
*: Yes, really.