Report: Poor quality costing content providers billions

Delivering a poor viewer experience cost global content brands about $2.16 billion in revenue in 2012, and "without a shift to higher quality, content brands will miss out on an additional $20 billion through 2017," preemptive video stream optimization provider Conviva said in a report on the state of online video.

Based on 22.6 billion worldwide video streams analyzed throughout 2012, Conviva determined that about 60 percent of all video streams experienced quality degradation, including 40 percent that were impacted by low resolution picture because of low bitrates, 20.6 percent impacted by buffering and 19.5 percent impacted by slow startup.

And viewers noticed. Conviva research showed that in 2011, a 1 percent increase in the amount of time spent buffering during VOD led to three minutes less of viewing time. And things aren't getting better, because today that same 1 percent leads to an eight minute loss.

"Online video providers know that consumers have low tolerance for problems with playback. Their problem is understanding what the boundaries are," said Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst of nScreenMedia, in a Conviva press release.

Conviva is pushing an agenda to have better control of the content as it traverses the Internet and is delivered to consumers, including implementing real-time viewer measurement, preemptive stream adjustment and network quality mapping, all of which fall into the company's product lines.

In addition to showing where the viewer experience is degrading, the Conviva report also notes the best content sites and explains what these providers are doing to increase quality and viewer engagement.

"Viewers are becoming increasingly less tolerant of a poor viewing experience when streaming online content," reiterated Darren Feher, Conviva's CEO, who added that "content providers have little to no visibility into how frequently this intolerance occurs."

For more:
- Conviva issued this press release

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