A bit of a deep dive into SmartVideo's video view counting
Our system tracks video view counts based on our collection and processing of raw video events generated by end users when viewing one of your videos. We turn this stream of raw events into summarized, anonymized playback sessions. These include all the cool video playback quality analytics that we share with you on your SmartVideo dashboard.
The first thing to be aware of is that a video view is counted as soon as our predictive lazy loading believes a user may intend to view your video. Our proprietary system immediately begins optimizing the video load so that as soon as your user hits that play button, the video starts instantly and plays back in amazing quality, no matter the user's device or location. This means that each video load consumes bandwidth and resources from our system whether the user watches all, some, or none of the video.
This is partially why we track video views instead of direct bandwidth, as bandwidth-based usage would penalize your website for delivering high-quality HD video versus smaller, low-res video. We don't want you to have to make that decision, so we always optimize for the best quality video and all you need to care about is video views. These should align very closely to page views which most webmasters are very keenly attuned to with their web analytics.