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.”

Tags: Internet video, online video, online video content, online video research, Video

Posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 1:34 pm under Technology, Video.

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