Streaming Video Study and Analysis Summary

The study my partner and I conducted surrounded the theme of video streaming services. We wanted to gather insight on the Kalamazoo College student community in terms of what services were most common and effective, as well as how often and what device students used to watch the streaming media. Primarily we were seeking information on the usage of Netflix and the services which they compete with. Our questions alluded to Hulu, HBO Go, Amazon Instant Video, Netflix and the option to answer with “other,” if there was an alternative service we left out. We obtained 100 survey responses from our classmates. Each of our surveys asked the respondent to describe their video streaming habits for the previous week.  We found some interesting trends among students at Kalamazoo College. YouTube was the most used with almost the entire sample stating they have used YouTube in the last week while Netflix fell second with a little over half of our sample.

Although Netflix was one of the popular services to use, it received low average ratings (1-5, 1 being not satisfied 5 being very satisfied) in: selection, ease of use, and value for price. On the other hand, it did receive a higher average rating of 4.2 for quality of the video streamed. People were not as happy with the service it seemed overall, but we found students ranked quality of video as more important in determining amount of use.  One other interesting observation was that YouTube’s selection rating was second lowest although it possesses by far the largest amount of videos to choose from.

 Our data roughly emulated some former studies done on Netflix and other video streaming services.  These studies surveyed many more people so their outcomes are much more telling of the larger population of streaming service users. What we found was: the amount of people who pay for their subscription is similar to the past studies done, while the average number of hours a person watches Netflix each week is less here at Kalamazoo College than what was found in the studies done on a larger scale.  We feel our study overall illustrates the streaming usage habits of college students and reflects the Kalamazoo College student community justly.

-Alex Ducoffe