Video quality less important when content is engaging.

Video quality less important when you’re enjoying what you’re watching http://bit.ly/bE44lX Not surprising result, gells with my experience.

Although most of us within the production community care greatly about quality of image and sound, it turns out our audiences are probably not paying the same level of attention. Once quality gets “good enough” the average viewer stops caring about quality and watches content.

Using four studies, Kortum, along with co-author Marc Sullivan of AT&T Labs, showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to DVD quality. Participants viewed the two-minute clips and then were asked about the video quality of the clips and desirability of the movie content.

Kortum found a strong correlation between the desirability of movie content and subjective ratings of video quality.