Most people say no to slow online video
Online video viewing might be on the rise, but four out of five people leave a video's Web page if it rebuffers, a new study from TubeMogul has found.
About 81 percent of Web users leave an online video page if they encounter mid-stream rebuffering, a new study from video analytics firm TubeMogul has found.
Rebuffering has become a major issue for most Web users. And even though TubeMogul found that just 7 percent of streaming video is slow-loading, it said Web video still can't quite match TV-quality viewing.
"The technology just isn't there yet to have a TV-like experience," David Burch, marketing director at TubeMogul, said in a statement. "And if it's an advertiser hosting video on a branded site or distributing it across the Web, people are just clicking away when they see that spinning wheel."
TubeMogul conducted its study by sampling 192 streams from leading content delivery networks--Akamai, Limelight, Edgecast, and Bit Gravity to name a few. According to TubeMogul, the services it tested "help to power video across thousands of sites." But they aren't quite doing as nice a job as some users had hoped.
TubeMogul found that Limelight performed best out of all the services it tested, experiencing slow load times just 4 percent of the time. It was followed by Panther Networks, Akamai, Edgecast, and BitGravity, respectively.
Although slow load times are still a problem on the Web, it's not stopping people from attempting to view streaming content. A recent Nielsen study found that online video viewing was up a whopping 34.9 percent in the last quarter, compared to a year prior. Now the CDNs just need to catch up.