For years, I've railed against the myth of "broadcast quality," primarily because that term is never defined in any sort of general way, but also because if you've got the right content, the quality doesn't matter. Shoot a tornado with your cellphone and suddenly your cellphone shoots "broadcast quality" video, right? Well, researchers at Rice University have taken this a step further with a fascinating study that shows that quality really doesn't matter - as long as you've got great content.

"The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings” by Philip Kortum and Marc Sullivan appears in the February 2010 issue of the journal Human Factors and involved 100 participants watching 180 different videos encoded at different bitrates, from crappy (550 Kbps) to about DVD quality. “At first we were really surprised by the data,” Kortum said. “We were seeing that low-quality movies were being rated higher in quality than some of the high-quality videos. But after we started analyzing the data, we determined what was driving this was the actual desirability of the content."

This is not entirely surprising, of course, but I have two concerns with the study. (1) The 100 participants were probably all students, maybe even mostly undergrads. These folks have basically grown up watching technically poor-quality content, from reality television to postage-stamp sized, poorly lit, hand-held GooTube clips of their friends riding skateboards. (2) The researchers did not ask their non-expert subjects to assess the technical quality of the video, but simply to subjectively rate the "quality," concluding that "[t]he effects of content should be considered when evaluating the subjective quality of encoded video content." That seems obvious.

Still, the important takeaway here for me and you, however, is significant: Content is king and is equivalent to technical quality in importance. There is a dark side to the equivalence of content and quality, however. If your content sucks, no amount of technical expertise will save you.

References:
* Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Volume 52, Number 1, February 2010 , pp. 105-118(14)
* Video quality less important when you’re enjoying what you’re watching, by bjs on August 12, 2010