Survey Says: Poor Video Quality Drives Watchers Away
A study sponsored by content delivery network Akamai comes to the convenient conclusion that problems with video quality frustrate and deter users. But if you can get past the fact that it was paid for by a company that’s lost $3 billion in market capitalization in the last month and needs to prove its service is worth the money — and I fully understand if you can’t — there’s some interesting statistics here.
Forty-three percent of people who watch online video at least once a week said they would switch to a competitor if the quality of a site’s video was poor, according to the study, conducted by Jupiter Research on Akamai’s behalf and available for a free download if you cough up your contact info.
That finding is out of line with the commonly accepted wisdom at NewTeeVee that people prefer availability of content to quality of content — a conclusion drawn from the enormous popularity of YouTube and P2P file-sharing. However, many, like our fearless leader Om, are eagerly awaiting the day when video quality gets “an HD upgrade,” as he called it last week.
According to Jupiter, the biggest frustrations with online video are due to buffering, sluggish playback, and poor picture quality (see chart above). Survey participants also cited a preference for watching video on TV and a lack of time as deterrents for watching video online.
As for improvements to online video, those surveyed said they’d most like to see the viewing area enlarged, followed by a desire to download full video programs to their PCs.
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[...] few days ago NewTeevee blogged about this interesting study commissioned by Akamai. It found that one of the biggest headaches for viewers of video on the web are the inexorable [...]
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[...] may say the same about US-based video sharing sites in the US. YouTube has all the traffic, but the video quality is not anything to write home [...]
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— 6:00 AM on September 21, 2007
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[...] lawsuit against YouTube, and also seemed to coincide with growing dissatisfaction with the poor quality of most online video content. Sony’s move may soon be considered to have been a shrewd one. YouTube certainly had all the [...]
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There is already a ton of HD content that is available for download out there. Here is just a small sampling:
http://www.mefeedia.com/lists/81/
These are all available for download into Miro (preferred) or iTunes, making it viewable for offline as well as online viewing and even available for viewing on the TV. :)
The problem is that a lot of the 1st generation video sites are still caught up with the ease of Flash video. The 2nd generation online video networks – such as Mefeedia :-) – bring together quality content and make it available openly to enjoy WHENEVER and WHEREVER you want.
Did the survey note how much dissatisfaction was created by poor video quality of “free” online porn content?
Because that probably screwed the pooch… I mean skewed the results.
Just sayin’.
It’s my (perhaps subjective) assessment that poor audio quality is much much worse than poor video quality.
People seem to be more forgiving of less than perfect video than they are of audio.
– Charles Iliya Krempeaux
http://changelog.ca/
Mark,
So colorful in your description. Love it.
We’ve did a piece yesterday about Stage6. If video quality was the most inportant factor, Stage6 that offers much better video quality, was a huge success. As you can see in our post – they are not …
http://pravdam.com/2007/08/08/guest-writer-guy-nesher-what-went-wrong-with-stage6/