Video Quality Inconsequential if Content Is Good

It would appear that people tend not to notice poor video quality in their video feeds (on the Internet or on TV) if they are really enjoying what they are watching.

According to investigators at the Rice University Department of Psychology, TV shows, Internet videos, and clips shot with the mobile phone were watched with equal enjoyment, regardless of poor quality.

Conversely, the researchers determined that people become extremely picky about the quality of the images they view once the actual content becomes difficult or unpleasant to watch.

The investigation is detailed in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific journal Human Factors, in a paper entitled “The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings.”

The document was authored by Rice professor and faculty fellow Philip Kortum. “Research has been done asking if people can detect video quality differences. What we were looking at was how video quality affects viewers in a real way,” he says.

AT&T Labs expert Marc Sullivan was the coauthor of the new work, which unites the results of four independent research studies.

The investigations were conducted on a number of 100 participants, who all watched a number of 180 movie clips.

These clips were all encoded at different levels, from 50 kilobits per second up to DVD quality. The experts say that the content of the videos proved to have a great influence on the test results.

After the participants watched each of the 2-minute videos, they were asked to rate image quality and a trait known as content desirability.

The desirability of movie content and the subjective ratings of video quality were discovered to be intimately linked, Kortum reveals.

“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,” Kortum says.

“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,” he adds.

“This strong relationship holds across a wide range of encoding levels and movie content when that content is viewed under longer and more naturalistic viewing conditions,” the expert concludes.

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