Your Player: How Fast to First Frame?

Did you “like” or “dislike” a video this week?

Watching video is an emotional experience. Sure, most programming is supposed to be – your favorite program, a riveting news piece, or even a lousy movie will all elicit a specific feeling, but even the most straightforward and not-very-interesting piece of content is still elevated when delivered by video as opposed to straight text. Why? Simply put, video is essentially an amalgam of every other communication medium. With your brain engaged by text, pictures, and sound, stories become more memorable and knowledge is transmitted and retained more completely. With a plurality of our senses working in concert, we’re not only more inclined to make purchase decisions, we’re also more likely to abandon a video that isn’t getting the job done:

Video is such an effective sales tool that according to recent research from Hubspot, 81% of polled businesses are using it – that’s up from 63% just last year. [1]
Over 85% of online viewers who stop watching a video left because the loading time was too long. [2]
67% of viewers say that quality is the most important factor when watching live streamed programming [3]

The long and short of it is this: whether someone is clicking “Play” or the video is set to start with a page load, every second between the intended start and the actual start brings you closer to viewer abandonment. No matter if your goals are to inform, inspire, elicit, or entertain, playback quality really, really matters. To add more complexity to the mix, our multi-screen consumption habits require that your video performs well no matter if it’s being viewed in a living room, at a desktop, on a phone, or anything else in your life that has a screen on it. Meeting consumers on their terms only works if their expectations are being met or exceeded.

PDK6: OPTIMIZED PLAYBACK PERFORMANCE

Both speed and quality drove the innovations contained in the newly-released sixth version of our Player Development Kit (PDK6). Built from the ground up for the most up-to-date browser standards for playback, UI rendering, and autoplay requirements, PDK6 is optimized to be the fastest to first frame, with playback at lightning-fast speeds in most cases. PDK6 brings a host of improvements to the consumer experience, as well as to operational efficiency:

Better advertising: PDK6 loads faster, renders ads natively, and supports both client and server-side ad insertion out-of-the-box and integrates with ad-serving platforms.
Unmatched flexibility: The streamlined and mobile-friendly UI building make PDK6 easy to implement and customize, while also providing a consistent player experience across browser platforms and device types.
Broad industry support: PDK6 is pre-integrated with third-party analytics vendors, and provides support for analytics solutions from providers such as comScore, Nielsen, Google, NPAW, and much more.

To learn more about the capabilities of PDK6, download the technical one-sheet here.

[1] “The State of Video Marketing in 2018,” Hubspot, January 24, 2018.

[2] “2017 Video Streaming Perceptions Report.” Mux, April 13, 2017.

[3] “What Audiences Expect from Live Video,” New York Magazine and Livestream, infographic, 2017