New Video Player Feature: Choose your video quality

Hello AOL Video users. Its been a little while since we've been in touch. When we last blooged in December of 2009, we had just released a collection of backend features that improved general functionality for AOL editors and international users. We were very proud of our work, as it contributed to the overall stability of the video player product. Over the course of Q1 and Q2 of 201, we've continued to introduce platform and stability enhancements.

We're sure you'll agree that stability is important. We think you will also agree that ease of use is even more important. That's why we're very excited to introduce our new video quality selection feature. Now users can choose the video quality setting that's ideal for their Internet connection speed and video quality expectations. BTW: You can click here to watch the Iron Man 2 trailer and checkout the new video quality selection feature.

Of course you are most welcome to keep reading. For a while now, video featured around AOL's network of sites is optimized for three user profiles:

• Users with dial-up or slower broadband connection speeds
• Users who have access to average connection speeds typically delivered through DSL or cable modems
• Users who have high-speed access or are willing to wait a little longer to get high quality video content.

We offered user-based quality selection several years ago. Last year, when we relaunched our video player with help from Brightcove, we experimented with dynamic Internet connection detection. The idea was that the player would recommend the best quality setting for your connection speed. For a variety of different reasons, we eventually dropped this approach, and for a good chunk of last year, opted to surface a single lower quality profile to the majority of users. There were a couple of experiences around AOL where we attempted to offer high quality video because the experiences called for large, wide-format video players, but these were few and far in between.

The video quality selection now gives that control back to you by surfacing a simple toggle that lets you choose between three quality settings:

• LOW - for our lowest quality video, optimized for slower connection speeds. For gear heads, the LOW quality setting delivers bit rates of about 400 kilobytes per second.
• SD - for standard quality video, we are delivering video bit rates of about 700-800 kilobytes per second.
• HD - for high quality video, we are delivering video bit rate of approximately 1500 kilobytes per second.

Try out our new video quality selection feature while watching the Iron Man 2 trailer.