Video: How Long Will Viewers Watch VR Streams?
In this excerpt from a panel at Live Streaming Summit, Jaunt VR Head of Studio Grant Anderson discusses how long viewers will watch VR streams and how content developers should adjust their approach based on where their audience is today.
Read a complete transcript of Anderson's remarks in this clip:
Grant Anderson: This is something that we deal with every single day. When we're creating a new show, it's like, "Well what's the length going to be?" In general it's been around 3-6 minutes. That's kind of the sweet spot for a variety of reasons.
1. VR content is still relatively difficult and expensive to produce.
2. The bandwidth streaming requirements once you have it and then how long do people want to sit in the headsets and they're not very comfortable. They're still fairly big and bulky and expensive. And of course, we all know they're going to come down in size and comfort and price very rapidly. You get ridges on your nose, you get what we call "VR face," which is the straps around your face. You get hot. The lenses fog up. It can be not really comfortable.
The longest experience that we've created was for Sundance last year and it was 18 minutes long. What we're really experimenting with, like the series that we dropped last week with the piece ... A series that we did with Doug Lyman. It's the first-five part thriller series. Episodes are about six minutes in length and there's five of them, so you have roughly about 40 minutes total of content. They're short episodes so you can watch a few and then break out and then come back in, so we're finding that to be very successful. As people get more acclimated to VR and looking at VR and the headsets get more comfortable, we're pushing the length of shows and I know from a lot of people that I'm talking about, everybody's hot to do the first feature length in VR. I'm like, "Ooh, you know. I don't know." It's a little dicey right now just in terms of comfort and being able to sit in that.
I'll be curious to see how that plays out. Mostly they're shorter. We're generally around the average of five minutes in length for all those reasons and also because a lot of people still don't have access to the glasses. We all know about them in here, but if you go out on the street, a lot of people won't know how to get them and ... The vast majority of places that people are seeing this are places like this or trade shows or Comic-Con where you have to get a lot of people through and that's another reason to keep them short.
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