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."
Brilliant business model. (Score:2)
Re:Brilliant business model. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever notice that the Advertisements load faster and are of better quality (DPI) many times than the video?
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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:Brilliant business model. (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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That's been my experience as well; I can't get a CBS station here so I watch Big Bang Theory on the CBS's web site. However, I can't find any current episodes on TPB, just the first four seasons.
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You mean higher bitrate or resolution. DPI has no meaning in the world of video, with different display devices.
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Yeah...that.
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Forgive me for trying to mitigate the usage of inaccurate or incorrect terminology. If I'd been trying to make them sound stupid I would have thrown in some insults.
I suppose you'd harp on me if someone was clinging to the old "72dpi" myth and I corrected them.
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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.
Re:Brilliant business model. (Score:4, Informative)
No [opera.com]
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In before a million posts about AdBlock. I put up with the ads simply because I want this business model to succeed. Yes, I suppose that makes me stupid. Though I'll be ready for the day they can seamlessly insert ads into the same stream as
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.
If a video freezes (Score:3)
"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.. (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..
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Well sure, what did you think really happened on the Titanic?
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I don't know, I forgot the ending of the movie . . .
Leo DiCraprio Dies! Probably the best performance of his career.
Re:so passenger ships.. (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.
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Well sure, what did you think really happened on the Titanic?
I stopped watching it because the video froze for a few seconds and never saw the end.
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It's my opinion that the summary was carefully worded to avoid mentioning what they're "jumping ship" from.
Assuming, of course, it's not about real ships and people jumping off of them.
My battleship for an editor!
BIG data? (Score:3)
Re:BIG data? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [happytechnologist.com] with "big" data. But let's not get carried away with the italics now people... this way madness lies.
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" But let's not get carried away with the italics now people... this way madness lies."
It leads to ALL CAPPS!
Users who experience failures when they try to pla (Score:2)
Take note, Slashdot.
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but I came back
Romero Institute (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:Romero Institute (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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"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."
I think the OP's point is that some research is simply not worth the paperwork and grant money. I mean knowing precisely how broken a video can be before people stop watching is interesting, b
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.
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What they really should do is play the ad after the video. Sure you'd lose out on the people who close the window partway through the video, but since almost every video site has a "you might also like.." linkbox after the video, they have a perfect place to capture a semi-attentive audience who aren't leaving right away (they're looking around for the next video to view.)
Of course they'd want some metrics to determine things like the average length of time that a person spends on that page before deciding
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I think the OP's point is that some research is simply not worth the paperwork and grant money. I mean knowing precisely how broken a video can be before people stop watching is interesting, but theire are more interesting, and possibly more important, things out there. Studies like these divert resources from those research projects especially now during hard economic times.
Well, in the OP perfect world where everybody else is lined up with their beliefs and values, perhaps. In the real world, I bet this is where the money is because that is where the people are spending it and therefore judge it interesting and important by voting with their money. Providing people what they want is what will stimulate trade which will help the economy. Planned guesses at what might help the economy are less than optimistic given past histories with such things.
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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.
Give him/her a break; their posts are almost always insightful or entertaining. In this case, you are correct in that the quantification is useful info, however the GP post was entertaining in that it was humorous.
GirlInTraining, please don't stop posting here.
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...
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Interesting theory, but I suspect its probably worse for non-porn. If the 30s video of Fluffy doing a backflip takes 20s to load or looks like a slideslow, chances are you'll already be searching around for something more entertaining long before Fluffy's feet leave the ground.
On the other hand if you're in the middle of getting your wank on, you're probably less likely to take a "break" while you hunt around for a site with better video quality and thus more likely to overlook / ignore blips in the video
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This study is really a revelation for me, the findings are highly non-obvious. I had thought that people would wait indefinitely for the video to appear, based on the "sunken costs" theory, i.e. I've already invested mm minutes and ss seconds waiting for this to appear and it might appear at any moment.
This actually captures well why people should hesitate before deriding studies which have seemingly obvious outcomes. This study may be on the margins of that - although it is the quantification that is actually interesting about it - but sometimes studies find counterintuitive results [spring.org.uk]. Even better, if a study produces a what may be a counterintuitive result then hindsight bias [wikipedia.org] means people will tend to revise memories so they believe that was the expected outcome all along.
less about quality, and more about functioning (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".
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Definitely - I don't mind low quality video most of the time. Sorry, but people who require high definition are looking at the picture, and not the content.
Skipping, pausing, buffering, out of sync sound, and flakey sound are the things that bother me. They're nothing to do with video quality as most people understand it.
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Definitely - I don't mind low quality video most of the time. Sorry, but people who require high definition are looking at the picture, and not the content.
Skipping, pausing, buffering, out of sync sound, and flakey sound are the things that bother me. They're nothing to do with video quality as most people understand it.
To each his own I guess. While it's not as important as proper basics, high def is still pretty high on my list.
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Granted that it is a lower bit rate, but Spotify seems to manage to reliably deliver audio streaming with almost instant start and no pauses. So maybe the video streaming sites could learn from this.
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This report is what Comcast uses to determine just how much to throttle Netflix to get the most people to come running back to cable but not run afoul of the FCC.
Five... (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).)
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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).)
In Australia Youtube now interupts your video at a random point and inserts unskippable ads. I have stopped using Youtube for the most part. That's just too annoying.
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Definitely. And worse to watch four videos on a site that have the same unskippable ad at the beginning of each. It's a good time saver as it makes me realize I don't need to consume the content.
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Worse... they're loud with superficial friendliness that says, "my friend, I have a wonderful offer for you..." Ugh, I'd take a throbber any day over pre-video ads.
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Or worse than that, "Get your Depends and all of your incontinence products delivered discretely from home! Just go to hdis.com! Nobody has to know!"
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What really pisses me off is when it starts playing automatically which a lot of US news sites do.
Oh and commercials that are longer than the video content. Or commercials for pure US products...
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Or, a 5 second commercial BEFORE the 30 second commercial starts. "Your content will start in a moment." And "your content" is a COMMERCIAL.
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Product placement (Score:2)
I skip all videos with ads
Are there major-studio feature films without any sort of product placement anymore?
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I keep going back and for on product placement. On the one hand, it's advertising, and if they're throwing in scenes because they need to place products the movie or show is likely to end up being kind of crappy.
On the other hand, our lives are full of commercial logos. If you were to film me right now you'd have a 20 oz Diet Coke in the frame. If Pepsi wanted to pay you to replace it with a Pepsi, presumably the movie wouldn't change one iota. So why not? Movie characters have to drive some kind of c
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Worse still is when they use said Mac for any high-end software (other than photo or video editing) or if it's used by a nerd. I mean sure, you'll get the rare nerd that uses one... but 99% of them will be using Windows or Linux.
That completely contradicts what people tell me in replies to my comments about development of applications for iOS. I often claim that it costs $1250 to get started in iOS development, including $650 to buy a Mac mini, the point being that that's a lot cheaper than the cost to start developing for a game console. But I tend to get a lot of replies claiming that it's unfair to include the $650 cost of switching from a PC that came with Windows or Linux to a Mac because developers are expected to already own
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I skip all videos with ads
Are there major-studio feature films without any sort of product placement anymore?
I can endure product placement if it doesn't hold up the film. But a 30 second pause on a can of Pepsi, unless it's *really really* germane to the plot and the director's artistic integrity, is probably not going to fly.
Incidentally, anyone remember Better Off Ted? They had hilarious commercials for bogus products.
I love the Power Glove. It's so bad. (Score:2)
I can endure product placement if it doesn't hold up the film.
Consider the film The Wizard (1989) [wikipedia.org]. Does the non-stop display of Nintendo products in that film "hold up the film"?
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That film is proof that even dirt eating Americans have a limit in terms of what they will tolerate.
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I can endure product placement if it doesn't hold up the film.
Consider the film The Wizard (1989) [wikipedia.org]. Does the non-stop display of Nintendo products in that film "hold up the film"?
Dunno. Never saw it, never plan to.
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Were there ever any in the past without product placement?
Typically dumb AC comment. Movies used to not have ANY brands displayed in them, or if they did it was an accident. DeBeers and the tobacco industry pioneered product placement in movies, because their products are not desirable without clever marketing. (Clear rocks, when there's so many pretty colors? A toxic weed, when there's a healing weed available?)
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There's a difference between a healing weed and a pain suppressing/distracting weed
There's a difference between reading the studies, and just running your mouth without knowing what you're talking about. You're doing the latter. It has cancer-fighting properties, among other health benefits more tangible than "relieves stress."
On top of that, raw tobacco isn't anywhere near as toxic as cigarettes
While that's true, the process of metabolizing nicotine produces free radicals.
I don't smoke either plant, and I understand your outrage at being in the 'loser' camp of the political debate about things to smoke.
You do or don't? Anyway, this issue is bigger than things to smoke. The same battle is being fought in basically every arena of modern life. The battle is corporations versus your rights.
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Hey now, movie trailers are an art form. They're frequently better than the films they advertise. :-)
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Burger King advertising Big Macs?
What's next? Cats sleeping with dogs?
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And that works for in-line commercials that are part of the video? I'm not talking those annoying video ads on the side of the frame.
Download? (Score:1)
I always make a download of any video I watch, and I watch it during download. Firstly, I don't see anything frozen, except EOF, of course. Secondly, I live in Russia. In Soviet Russia, TV watches YOU! - and I cannot be sure that the video I see today will be available tomorrow. And the last: Both Flash and Virii are NOT available for platform I use, so I have no choice except migration to Windows.
"Big Data" (Score:2)
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Impatience? (Score:1)
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: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: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.
That also fixes linux issues (Score:2)
Notably the "blue people syndrome". Incidentally, it also allows the playback of 10bit content, if you manage to find a site serving those.
In any case, Adobe is at fault for the lousy "hardware" support.
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Might be a graphics driver issue (Flash video is hardware accelerated on recent hardware). What kind of graphics hardware are you running?
Never had an issue like that myself on Youtube (other sites, sure, but not Youtube).
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Flash video is only hardware accelerated if the webmaster chooses to take advantage of it.
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But Youtube is definitely accelerated... and that's whee he's having problems.
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"To watch this video you must install MS Silverlight".
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2. Websites that insist on posting useless bandwidth-hogging 'talking head' videos rather than posting a simple photo and a text summary.
So I see I am not the only one who visits foxnews.com [foxnews.com]
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11. Video content that is purely snippets of text fading in and out with various video editor techniques. I can't count how many videos I've clicked on only to find plain text content. There is something about people these days that makes them want to put everything in a video otherwise "it doesn't feel real".
Damn right, cannot agree more on this.
I was tethering for my internet connection for a month and had to stay below 5 Gb lest I be throttled. I was searching for info on X and found something promising, but a video.
Load it up and watch - nothing but video of text with a couple still images embedded. I was quite furious - what's wrong with people that put those together and what kind of idiot is their intended audience?!?
Grrr.
Pfft video (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.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmDDqtj3m00 [youtube.com]
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Personally, I bail when the content is a video. Give me back my plain text internet, please.
Videos are such a waste of time.
Totally. Next time you are in a noisy bar, try reading the TTS feed along the bottom of the TV. You will go slowly mad waiting for it.
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Here you go [asciimation.co.nz]
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Where is this text format at? :)
No shit. (Score:2)
But will management listen to this study or will they continue to live in fantasy land where people actually like their poor service and advertising?
This again (Score:2)
But the reality is that page loads have become slower, not only due to large number of ads, but a non responsive and evidently critically maimed Google Analytics. Yet despite these issues, u
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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, w
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Works fine for me with Netflix on a PS3, 360, or Wii (in order of preference and quality). On the PC, it's a mixed bag, but at least the other three are consistent.
Netflix's ~6Mbps streams can look pretty stunning on my calibrated 52" LCD, and it degrades gracefully instead of freezing if something else decides i
And yet ... (Score:2)
derp (Score:2)
Just press pause (Score:2)
Simply press pause and wait for the video to load. That's how I watch all my videos.
Streaming simply does not work. It's not a bandwidth issue, it's that the flash-based video players involved are crap and can't do buffer management or seeking properly.
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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
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In my experience it tends to be less a failing of the design and infrastructure of the Internet as a whole and more a failing of whoever is hosting the content (bogged-down server(s) or lack of bandwidth on their end).
There are always exceptions, of course, I know a few people who insist on using "wireless broadband" even when they have access to FTTH/FTTP services simply because they chose the wireless service a year or two ago and they keep telling themselves it's "good enough" (while waiting 30-90 second
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(GRIN) I remember telling customers at the dawn of the (generally available) internet age, that standard TCP/IP was inherently unsuitable for time-dependent video (or audio!) content. They didn't believe me... "But it works! And it's cheeeper!"
Beer (Score:2)
In other news, researchers have found that when people take a sip of beer and it tastes like sh*t, they drink less.
Humans. Always stating the obvious.
This just in (Score:2)
Users who know that making something of good quality is possible are not going to accept worse quality at the same price.
I am absolutely shocked at this revelation.
Reading the stats wrong (Score:3)
Some videos won't cache properly (Score:2)
I don't really understand the reasoning behind that decision
Too late (Score:2)
Been there done that. I now actively avoid video content on the internet. For instance, if I'm on Google news or some such, some of the news links lead to video content. Back when I clicked them, 80% - 90% of the time I'd have to watch an ad, or dismiss a banner at the bottom, or have another unrelated window automatically open. OR, the video would require some obscure codec, would freeze or fail to load, or the link would be dead - whatever. Maybe a tenth of the time I'd actually get the news story I wante