The quality of a streamed video has many influences, of which two are the buffer time, and the number of interrupts. There s no definitive research on what is the best buffer to interrupt ratio for a given content. The focus of research for this IQP is the effects of buffering and interrupts on user quality of experience for online video, with a specific focus on Netflix and YouTube. This IQP attempts the answer the question of whether or not viewers prefer YouTube videos to have short initial buffers and Netflix videos to have minimal interruptions. This is achieved using online surveys with test videos of varying buffer times and number of interrupts. The survey resulted in over 250 responses from users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The results show there is no significant difference between the buffer time, and the number of interrupts with regards to user quality of experience.
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