Jupiter Research has released a study sponsored by Akamai, the big content delivery network, that says that the quality of the online video experience matters. (with Akamai as a sponsor I don’t see how the results could be different)

The key points from the study

• Online video that is interrupted for buffering purposes and playback that is slow to begin are the greatest sources of frustration with online video
• Sluggish playback and the presumption of a slow Internet connection are mitigating online video adoption.
• Web sites with an unsatisfactory video experience can expect to lose site visitors.
• Online video users are willing to accept advertising as a means of gaining free online video content.
• More than one-quarter of online consumers are interested in bandwidth-intensive video
  content, such as full-length movies and TV programs viewed from their PCs.
• Second only to the ability to enlarge the viewing area, the most popular advanced feature for online video is the ability to download to a PC for later viewing.

Ok, so they paid for a study that found out that consumers want fast playback, broadband adoption matters, people are happy to watch free stuff with ads, people want to watch TV shows when the want on the internet, people want better quality video and if they don’t get those things at your site they will go somewhere else.

All this and they failed to ask if the quality of the content matters. I’m not sure there’s any insight here, but maybe we all need to run, not walk, to our nearest content delivery network provider.