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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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.
Frank Sinton on August 7th, 2007 at 3:19 pm - Permalink
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’.
mark day on August 7th, 2007 at 4:56 pm - Permalink
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/
Charles Iliya Krempeaux on August 7th, 2007 at 5:48 pm - Permalink
Mark,
So colorful in your description. Love it.
Om Malik on August 7th, 2007 at 10:45 pm - Permalink
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