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."
Re:Top 10 Online Video Complaints... (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.
Re:Romero Institute (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
We want TV but not TV. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.