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Archive for August, 2010

Good video content more important than technical quality Thursday, August 19th, 2010

A recent study by psychologists at Rice University has revealed that the content of an online video, not its technical quality, is its most important feature.

The study “The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings”, appears in the journal Human Factors.

The researchers showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to DVD quality. Participants viewed the two-minute clips and then were asked about the video quality of the clips and desirability of the movie content.

They found a strong correlation between the desirability of movie content and subjective ratings of video quality.

Study leader Professor Philip Kortum said, “At first we were really surprised by the data. We were seeing that low-quality movies were being rated higher in quality than some of the high-quality videos. But after we started analyzing the data, we determined what was driving this was the actual desirability of the content. If you’re at home watching and enjoying a movie, we found that you’re probably not going to notice or even concern yourself with how many pixels the video is or if the data is being compressed.”


Shameless self-promotion, parts XXXVI and XXXVII Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

Here’s a video we produced recently for HotHouse Interactive to announce their recent move to new premises. Simon is the star and Ray has a cameo at the one-minute mark!