Required Video Quality (08-10-10)

Designers often need to prioritize expenditures, and new research indicates that they may be able to purchase lower quality video equipment in certain circumstances without dramatically compromising user experience.   Kortum and Sullivan have determined that people who are enjoying what they’re watching are not as critical of video quality as people who are not watching material they enjoy – as the desirability of the content viewed increases, so do perceptions of video quality.    The relationship between desirability and video quality is quite robust and “this strong relationship holds across a wide range of encoding levels and movie content.”

Philip Kortum and Marc Sullivan.  2010. “The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings.”  Human Factors, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 105-118.