Top Performing 360 Video Genres in VR

The medium of 360 videos is still young, and the practice of viewing these videos in VR is even more recent. But 2016 has seen the release of several consumer VR headsets, and users are increasingly viewing 360 videos in VR rather than on their phone or browser. Since Vrtigo specializes in VR analytics and insights, we decided to look at popular genres of 360 videos to determine which performed best when viewed in a VR headset. We analyzed thousands of videos and looked at total views, unique viewers, repeat views, and completion rates.

Total views

We first looked at the total views of videos within each genre. Keeping in mind that a video can belong to more than one genre (e.g., both Music and Comedy), we found that the majority of views were for animated videos, with 35.6% of all views corresponding to videos in that genre. This makes sense, since computer animation is one of the most common and popular types of 360 video.

The next most popular genres by views were News & Documentary, Action, and Science & Technology, which is unsurprising since topics like flying and space exploration make for good 360 video experiences, especially when viewed in VR.

Unique viewers

We next looked at the number of unique users watching each video, grouped by genre. We find the same ordering of the categories for unique viewers as for video views, which is unsurprising since most people watch a video just once or twice.

It’s worth exploring what genres deviate from this trend of viewing each video only once, which brings us to our next metric.

Repeat views

We looked at the average number of times a video was viewed by a single user. Repeat viewings are an indication of engagement since a person will tend to re-watch a video they like, or pass the headset to the person next to them.

We found that videos that encourage users to explore scenes tend to attract more repeat viewers.

Completion rate

Finally, we looked at completion rate, which is a common measure of viewer engagement for both standard and 360 videos. We measured the fraction of the video that users watched, and then examined how far the median (50%), lower quartile (25%), and upper quartile (75%) users made it through each genre, shown on the following box plot.

We can see from the chart that movie trailers have the highest completion rates, followed by comedies and feature films. These genres have median completion rates of over 50% (half the views made it over half-way through the video).

Conclusion

We looked at four different ways of measuring 360 video engagement in VR. It was interesting seeing relatively unpopular genres such as travel and sports generating high repeat views. Depending on how we slice the data, we see different groupings of genres as top performers.

Next week, we’ll look at 360 video performance based on the techniques used to create the videos.

Vrtigo is the next generation VR analytics platform for developers, content creators and decision makers.