UPDATE September 19th, 2022
Who else knew David Tennant was so passionate about buffering?
The speed of our access to the internet has increased significantly in the last five years but this is a great reminder of the importance of using the right tool for the right job.
A great article here describes the danger of customer engagement on your website if your video buffers. The important part:
A new study by Ramesh Sitaraman, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Shunmuga Krishnan, of Akamai finds that the exact amount of time before viewers begin to abandon online video as a result of buffering is two seconds. After two seconds, the abandonment rate is reported to increase at roughly 5.8% per-second; meaning that after eleven seconds you will have lost over half your audience.
"After two seconds, the abandonment rate is reported to increase at roughly 5.8%", yikes! Does the video on your website buffer? If it does then you should really consider a different host. We utilize YouTube and Vimeo to manage and host all our videos. These services transcode your video to be as efficient as possible and serve up your video from their CDN's. a CDN is a content delivery network. What that means is that your content gets replicated to multiple servers around the country so a customer in WI may get your video from a Chicago server while someone in Las Vegas will be served from a Phoenix server. These services also serve up a plethora of formats so you can watch the same video on any device/technology. The bottom line is if you're hosting wmv's on your web server then you're in trouble.
This entry was posted in Musings, Promotional & Informational, Tips