The blip.tv blog

Player start time

Load time is one of the most important things on the Web. The faster something loads the more people view it, and the longer they spend with it. Google has found that just milliseconds in page load time improvement can make them tens of millions of incremental dollars.

For the past several weeks we’ve been slavishly focused on improving player start time. This is the amount of time it takes for the video to start playing after a viewer clicks play. I’m happy to announce that as of today we’re beating our initial goals for player start time improvement.

We’re going to be moving the goal posts soon. We’re not yet at the point where playback is or seems instant, which is where we want to be. We’ll be spending a lot more time on this. You’ll see the benefit in better viewer satisfaction, higher viewership and greater viewer engagement. There’s a lot of work left to do, but we’re on our way.