The great video hypocrisy
Let's start with a story and see if you can relate. Don’t you hate when you're watching a video on ____________.com and, suddenly, it just stalls/hangs/fails?
Fill in the blank.
Now, ask your friends, neighbors, co-workers the same question... Every one of them will likely relate on all but one point: which website goes in the blank.
For you it may be YouTube, but your cousin in Maine says that Hulu’s videos always buffer for them. Or maybe it's HBO Go from your coworker who lives one city over.
What is going on here? 🤔
Video delivery fails all of the time. Sometimes it is localized to one website in one region for an hour, or it can be a more generalized failure for everyone, which of course draws more notice. But everyone can agree: videos fail to play, stall-out, and degrade to unwatchable, pixelated resolutions far too often. And nobody is happy about it.
But our videos always load fine when I look
Now, the big issue. Just because videos on your website playback fine for you doesn't mean that Uncle John in Tennessee has the same experience, or more broadly your customer base in Brazil, Madrid, Tuscaloosa, or wherever they may be. If you hate when videos fail on your favorite site, don’t you think that some of your users are saying the same about your videos?
Video delivery experience is individual 👩
Every video watching experience is individual. Just because you or even 100 people in your area have no problems, doesn't mean there are no problems for anyone anywhere.
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks
There is no guaranteed quality of service. If a video fails on your website, you may not notice, but the customer who was watching sure did and they will remember that failure. Why? Because it placed a barrier between them and your content. Do you think they will come back to your website or go somewhere else next time? How important is growth to your brand, and can you accept that your growth is being stifled by your video failing?