Conviva Leadership
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If your business is the delivery of video on the Internet there are certain problems that you may not like, but have had to learn to live with. Video stalls, poor picture quality and slow video starts all take their toll on your audience. These problems are costing you money but since you don’t know the extent of the issues you just don’t know how much. New data from Conviva lays bare the full dimension of the problems and the amount of revenue you may be missing out on. Unfortunately, the news is not good.According to Conviva, content providers missed out on a staggering $2.2B due to poor viewer experience in 2012. If corrective action is not taken to fix this an additional $20B through 2017 will be lost. Eye-popping though these numbers are, the root cause of all these loses stem from one simple fact: online viewers are less tolerant of playback problems than most of us thought.Conviva tracks the time a movie or show playback is paused while buffering (this is when playback is frozen while waiting for more video to arrive from the Internet.) The Viewer Experience Report shows that in 2011, a 1% increase in buffering resulted in 3 minutes less video watched. In 2012, the same 1% increase in buffering time resulted in a viewer watching 8 minutes less video. Clearly, intolerance to buffering has increased dramatically. What does a 1% increase in buffering really mean? Making a viewer wait just 18 seconds during a 30 minute show can result in him missing two full ad breaks.Video quality is also a critical part of the experience. The Conviva report shows that viewers watching a high-quality live video stream watched 23% longer than those that saw low quality. Disconcertingly, poor quality video experiences are the norm in live streaming with less than 40% delivered with high quality.
However, the most shocking problem is the impact of making a viewer wait for the video to start playing. Simply put, a video provider has just 2 seconds. For short form content – news clips and cat videos – viewer abandonment increases from under 20% if the video starts in 2 seconds to 80% if it takes 3 seconds or more. A one second delay will cost a provider most of its audience.
Just how widespread are these quality problems? I think it’s fair to say they are rampant. The report shows that about 60% of all streams experienced buffering, slow start or quality problems.
How does Conviva collect all this data? The company leverages its client-side technology to help customers better monitor video performance and optimize delivery. In 2012, Conviva obtained data from 22.6 billion worldwide video streams across more than 150 video sites including ESPN, HBO and Disney. So, the company would seem to be well placed to obtain quality data which is more widely representative of what’s going on in the industry.
While the report makes for sobering reading, it also offers up suggestions on how to go about addressing these endemic problems of the streaming industry. I strongly recommend you give the full report your time.
