'WATCHABILITY' OF VIDEO, ON-DEMAND
Considering bandwidth and excess internet ‘overheads’ is absolutely critical when talking about the ‘watchability’ of television (video) when delivered over the internet. This has long been understood in the academic world, with a 1995 experiment into video acceptability and frame rate revealing some interesting results. At the dawn of internet video capabilities, Adteker et al. suggested that that the absolute minimum guidelines to frames per second in 1995 was 15 frames per second (fps). anything less than this figure resulted in “very unacceptable viewing quality” (Adteker et al., 1995, p38).
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Today in 2012, one could argue that consumer demand of acceptable frame rates and overall video quality is on the rise due to the massive mainstream uptake of on-demand services like ABC’s iView within Australia. A smooth and uninterrupted video stream of 24-30 fps is very much desired when viewing good quality video over the internet. Anything less than this could directly affect the viewing experience for the media consumer.
This required frame rate, as a benchmark, is made all the more harder to achieve when trying to stream 720p and 1080p high definition video from legitimate online content providers such as Youtube and Vimeo. This level of detail requires an extremely high data transfer rate - between 20-25mBit/second to be precise, at 1080p HD @ 25fps (Wikipedia). A laggy or an intermittent connection problem will most likely cause a bad viewing experience for the consumer - hence the need for a highly reliable, super smooth and quite a sizable internet connection to do high quality, on-demand video. Anything less, and television consumers could quickly become very frustrated when trying to consume their television over the internet, ruining the experience completely for the consumer. Chris Winter from the ABC indeed confirms this trend - regarding it to be absolutely imperative to consider the overall viewing experience (and pleasure) for the online television consumer. Not only considering if advertisements should be apart of the picture (not an issue for Chris, as the ABC only provides free-to-air content to the Australian public) - but more importantly, considering real world variables such as frame rate, drop frames, buffering, overall resolution, Quality of Service (or QOS) over the network - and of course, that moment where your video drops out completely. A poor experience watching television online, due to excess buffering or dropped frames, could leave your audiences very disgruntled. For this reason, it is highly important to have considerable bandwidth ‘overhead’ when trying to stream any sort of on-demand video online. As Australia is right on the cusp when it comes to streaming true on-demand, HD television content, we’ll probably have to wait a few more years, when faster internet connections are available off the NBN backbone from 2015 and onwards. |