Rice University’s Department of Psychology has conducted a research showing that if we like what we’re watching, we’re less likely to notice the difference in video quality of the TV show, Internet video or mobile movie clip.
Even without the research finding, we already know that people are increasingly watching videos on smaller and smaller screens [Who would have thunk?] and earlier YouTube videos were awfully low resolution but still became viral.
The recently released study “The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings” authored by Philip Kortum, Rice professor-in-the-practice and faculty fellow, appears in the journal Human Factors. It took a grand total of four studies, 100 study participants, 180 two-minute movie clips encoded at nine different levels (from 550 kilobits per second up to DVD quality) to draw this conclusion.
“Kortum found a strong correlation between the desirability of movie content and subjective ratings of video quality.” In plain English, it means, they didn’t care about the image quality if the video clip was worth watching.
We couldn’t help noticing that this study is biased toward short 2-min clips. For two-minute clips, we agree with the finding. But two minutes are too short to draw such a far-reaching conclusion as far as movies and TV shows are concerned. Would participants answer the same way if they had to watch a low resolution full-length movie? Most probably not.