I’m developing a custom analytics solution for videos on my site… the functions are mapped to both a Flash player and a HTML5 <video> player.
General design advice would be greatly appreciated, but I’m specifically curious how often I should update the percent watched value… I was thinking I’d set a certain percentage threshold rather than according to a time (say, every 5 or 10 percentage points).
Then, as far as sending the data back to the server, I was thinking I’d just use regular Ajax POST requests, which would update a MySQL database.
Thing is, when I researched the Vimeo and YouTube HTML5 players, I couldn’t detect how they were handling analytics — so I’m wondering if they have a better implementation (?), as I can’t imagine that they don’t have any analytics.
Sending 20 or 10 Ajax requests for each video play seems somewhat inefficient (and that’s quite a few MySQL UPDATEs, too) — and the fidelity isn’t that high even.
(Sorry for the somewhat scattershot question — I can’t find much info on the subject.)
POST-ANSWER EDIT
How can Wistia boast they they track “second-by-second viewing statistics for individual views”? (That is, without sending a huge number of requests.)
I would send update at times 50% 25% 12.5% 6.125% … and so on (in reverse order) until time resolution gets too high (from a few seconds up to minute maybe.. your choice).
That way you’ll know which videos are watched fully/largely, and which ones are quickly dismissed.
There are of course many variations possible, but the key idea is to have best resolution in the beginning.