Video Rebuffering a Leading Cause of Viewer Abandonment, Says Akamai

One video rebuffering incident could result in more than $85,000 in lost revenue, blogged Alex Balford, senior product marketing manager at Akamai Thursday. There's no set industry standard to measure online video quality of experience, but rebuffering consistently “resonates in every conversation,” Balford said. He quoted an executive at a major broadcaster who said customer engagement drops when viewers see the spinning wheel “more than a couple of times.” The broadcaster’s target is to keep that rate below 0.5 percent; when it achieves that level, 90 percent of viewing sessions are completed, he said. At 0.5 percent-1 percent, the session completion rate falls to 80 percent, and at 1 percent, it plummets to 50 percent. Causes can be traced to the ISP, content delivery network, playback device or browser, Wi-Fi configurations, available bandwidth, network traffic and content itself, Balford said, quoting a broadcast executive calling video delivery “a complicated process with many loopholes and rabbit holes.” Audiences, Balford said, are becoming increasingly sophisticated in communicating about and identifying service issues. A video aggregator said users became upset when the company experimented with transcoding, leading to an apology and assurances it wasn’t trying to reduce quality or costs. Based on video traffic for a major U.S. network June 2017-June 2018, one rebuffer translates to 496,417 hours lost, or 10.7 million advertising impressions, assuming 11 minutes of ad time hourly at an average of 30 seconds per ad, Balford said.