Mobile users are more tolerant.

We study the impact of video stream quality on viewer behavior in a scientific data-driven manner by using extensive traces from Akamai’s streaming network that include 23 million views from 6.7 million unique viewers. We show that viewers start to abandon a video if it takes more than 2 seconds to start up, with each incremental delay of 1 second resulting in a 5.8% increase in the abandonment rate. Further, we show that a moderate amount of interruptions can decrease the average play time of a viewer by a significant amount. A viewer who experiences a rebuffer delay equal to 1% of the video duration plays 5% less of the video in comparison to a similar viewer who experienced no rebuffering. Finally, we show that a viewer who experienced failure is 2.32% less likely to revisit the same site within a week than a similar viewer who did not experience a failure.

secondly, as highlighted in Numerama yesterday (quoting the same study, in French), service providers who deliberately throttle video and/or specific video content providers, like Free currently does in France with Youtube are damaging the business of these content players, but also irritating customers. There’s only two ways this can go: either customers don’t care enough to churn and ultimately the Youtubes of this world will have to cave in and fork out to get quality delivery, or the customers care enough and leave visibly enough to force the service provider to actually provision the service properly. I know I’m one of the latter, and the first service provider who will provide me with a good offer from now on I’ll switch to. I’m a heavy Youtube user, and getting decent service on that matters more to me than a reputedly lame blueray player I’ve never used in my set-top box,