Digital Home Thoughts: 80% of Viewers Will Click Away if a Video Stream Rebuffers

"More than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a clip rebuffering, according to a new study by Tubemogul. The Emeryville-based video distribution and analytics startup took a close look at 192 million video streams over the course of 14 days to figure out how much rebuffers matter. The result: 6.81 percent of all streams rebuffer at some point, and around 2.5 percent rebuffer twice"

People are not very patient with re-buffering video streams. It appears that online video streaming will not be viable until the end to end solution is a lot more reliable. Viewers are not willing to accept videos that pause almost seven percent of the time. It seems like an odd phenomenon. People will wait through commercials (or at least until they can fast forward their DVR past the commercials) to watch TV, but if an online video re-buffers for a couple seconds they will quit watching. Maybe people who watch videos online are used to instant access to everything on the Internet. Alternatively, maybe they are more willing to wait for commercials to watch Grey's Anatomy than to watch a video of some strangers cat running into a window on YouTube.