It may seem like common sense that the quality of online
video streaming affects how willing viewers are to watch videos at a website.
But until computer science researcher Ramesh Sitaraman at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst and collaborators at Akamai developed a way to rigorously
study the question, no one had been able to scientifically test the assumption.
They conducted the first large-scale study of its kind to
quantitatively demonstrate how video stream quality causes changes in viewer
behavior. “Video stream quality is a very big topic of interest,” says
Sitaraman. “Anyone who provides online video content, from the major news
channels to sports and movie outlets, is worried about such things as do videos
fail, how fast a video starts up, does it freeze, and how such loss of quality
affects viewers.”