Rice University, AT&T Labs join forces on video quality study
Say you’re watching one of Network World’s compelling videos, like our recent B is for Botnet puppet show. You probably enjoyed it so much you didn’t even appreciate all the effort we went to in order to ensure the video quality is great.
That would be consistent with findings from Rice University and AT&T Labs researchers who found that the more you like something you’re watching on TV, the Internet or a smartphone, the less likely you are to be concerned with the technical video quality. They outline their findings in a paper called “The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings” authored by Philip Kortum, Rice professor-in-the-practice and faculty fellow, who worked with Marc Sullivan of AT&T Labs.
They conducted four studies involving 100 participants viewing 1802-minute video clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 Kbps up to DVD quality.
“At first we were really surprised by the data,” Kortum said in a statement. “We were seeing that low- quality movies were being rated higher in quality than some of the high-quality videos.”
The findings raise questions about the escalating race to boost video quality by service providers and content providers, as they employ the latest and greatest compression techniques. Google, for example, has been bolstering its technology arsenal in this area via internal development and via the acquisition route.
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