It's happened to everyone: while watching a video (i.e. on  YouTube), halfway through there is an annoying delay in the video loading (or "rebuffer"). How commonplace is this? We turned to our video analytics technology, which tracks detailed data on billions of monthly streams, for the answer.

Methodology

For a 14-day period, we recorded a sample of 192,268,561 streams from six top video sites and platforms, tracking detailed data on video delivery quality. The data hailed from the following top content delivery networks: Akamai, Edgecast and Limelight. The sample was primarily short-form content (i.e. 2-10 minutes), although long-form TV content was included.

Results

Some key data points:

• Rebuffers are commonplace, occurring in 6.84% of all streams.
• When encountering a rebuffer, viewers click away 81.19% of the time rather than wait for the video to re-load.
  
• Delays in start-time (the amount of time that passes between someone clicking "play" and a stream starting) were above one second for every network tested.

Analysis/Conclusions

As online video audiences continue to grow, CDN imperfections like these will be increasingly relevant to the publishers' bottom lines. When you consider that one out of 25 streams experiences a rebuffer and most people click away when that happens, it's probably fair to conclude that far fewer ads are getting clicked (or watched).

Campaign delivery stats like these are available to large publishers and platforms via our video analytics. Other stats include rebuffering and bandwidth usage by video, campaigns, geography.


Works Cited:

• TubeMogul's patent-pending video analytics technology and our partners.