【2011 Archives】

Buffering… Buffering… Aaaaad… Fist. Through. Laptop. Screen. Yes011 Archives we all know the feeling of trying to binge on some premium Netflix or Hulu eye food, but when a slow video stream results in a frozen screen or poor image quality, the euphoria disappears — and fast.

Because nothing means anything nowadays without hard data to back it up, cloud delivery platform Akamai decided to conduct a study into exactly what happens to our feels when the streaming starts to go bad.

Akamai teamed up with Sensum to measure more than 1,000 people's responses to low quality video streams. Shock! They hated the sucky video streams.

But the study, which used galvanic skin responses, facial coding software, and traditional survey questions for measurements, offers some hard proof of the buffer rage we all occasionally suffer through.

Aside from the data, the most important part of the study is the fact that the participants where asked to view the relative quality of experiences specifically in the content of OTT (over-the-top) services like Netflix and Hulu.

An April report from Streaming Media Research revealed that OTT viewing habits are paced to overtake traditional broadcast TV viewing habits by 2020. That's pretty obvious to us OTT bingers, but may be less so for those who've been living in a time bubble and still think "I don't own a TV" is fooling anyone into thinking that you aren't addicted to TV shows via the internet like the rest of us (cough — bullshit — cough).

So yes, Akamai's biometric study told us what we already knew, but putting it in the form of a real research report is a clear message to the OTT and broadband industry to step up their game. No matter how good that original programming is, a laggy binge is a bad binge.

Blessed be the high speed internet fruit.