In a NYT article, Rise of Web Video, Beyond 2-Minute Clips, Brian Stelter writes:

Video creators, by and large, thought their audiences were impatient. A three-minute-long comedy skit? Shrink it to 90 seconds. Slow Internet connections made for tedious viewing, and there were few ads to cover high delivery costs. And so it became the first commandment of online video: Keep it short.

I recall coming across this phenomenon in 1997 and 1998 while doing research work into characteristics of web video stored on the web at that point in time. Here’s an interesting graph from the paper I wrote on the subject:

Web Video Lengths (1997)

The number of videos on the web were relatively small and their sizes could be measured in seconds. 90% were 45 seconds or less. The graph is capped at around 2 minutes for maximum length although I did find outliers that were longer.

What I found interesting, however, in a followup study was that if you took away the bandwidth chokepoints, video lengths ballooned. I was studying the video access patterns of a Video On Demand experiment at the Lulea University in Sweden – the setup here was over a dedicated high speed network, effectively removing slow access as a determinant of behavior. Specifically:

Since 1995, the Centre for Distance-spanning Technology at Luleå University (CDT) has been researching distance education and collaboration on the Internet [17]. Specifically, it has developed a hardware/software infrastructure for giving WWW-based courses and creating a virtual student community. The hardware aspects include the deployment of a high speed network (2-34 Mbps backbone links) to attach the local communities to the actual University campus. The campus is also connected to the national academic backbone by a high speed 34 Mbps link [13] with student apartments being wired together with the rest of campus via 10 or 100 Mbps ethernet.

The following graph shows the distribution of video lengths for the files used in the system:

The mean duration of these files were around 75 minutes or so. This finding hinted that as videos grew in popularity and infrastucture hurdles fell away, video durations would increase. From the original NYT article:

New Web habits, aided by the screen-filling video that faster Internet access allows, are now debunking the rule. As the Internet becomes a jukebox for every imaginable type of video — from baby videos to “Masterpiece Theater” — producers and advertisers are discovering that users will watch for more than two minutes at a time.
:
:
“People are getting more comfortable, for better or for worse, bringing a computer to bed with them,” said Dina Kaplan, the co-founder of Blip.tv.

Ms. Kaplan’s firm distributes dozens of Web series. A year ago all but one of the top 25 shows on her Web servers clocked in at under five minutes. Now, the average video hosted by Blip is 14 minutes long — “surprising even to us,” she said. The longest video uploaded in May was 133 minutes long, equivalent to a feature-length film.

Interested by this, I took a look at the duration of the videos hosted by Delve. This is based on data a couple of weeks old, so this is not representative of the latest trends. However, I found the average video duration to be a little under 6 minutes. However, within this I found definite disparities between publishers. Our top 25 publishers (by video duration) had videos that were a little under 25 minutes on average. This indicates mixed video use by our publishers. While some are still sticking to shorter videos, a significant number are definitely taking full advantage of long form clips – one of the largest videos is around 12 hours in length!

It’ll be interesting to see how these trends hold over the next year or so.