Streaming Video Service Usage by Kalamazoo College Students

A recent study of 100 Kalamazoo College students examined their use of streaming video services.  Many aspects were studied with the survey including which services were used, how much they were used and customer satisfaction with the services.  YouTube was the most widely used services by students, with 91% of respondents reporting having used it within a week of taking the survey.  Following closely was Netflix with 58% of respondents reporting having used it within a week.  Remaining services such as Hulu/HuluPlus, HBO Go and others were reported to be used much less.

One very interesting finding of this study was the amount of people who actually paid to use Netflix.  Netflix is a monthly subscription-based service that requires an account to have access.  Of the 58 respondents that reported having used Netflix only 11 reported that they were paying for the service themselves.  This coincides with findings by a Nielsen survey of Netflix users that reported only 28% of those using Netflix paid themselves.  Perhaps Netflix ought to look into this issue and find ways to increase this lost revenue.

Another major aspect studied through this survey was satisfaction ratings of the streaming services that were used.  The graph below shows the four satisfaction categories that were studied and the results for each of those categories.

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Although Netflix was the most popular paid service, it returned some of the lowest satisfaction ratings of any service.  It ranked in the bottom two of every category except the quality of the video that was streamed.  This was surprising and seems not to backup the usage statistics. This study returned findings similar to other studies of its nature, with some small differences most likely due to the fact that this was a study solely of Kalamazoo College students and not the general population.