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I found this article by Jakob Neilsen on multi-media, located on the W3C web
site:

Guidelines for Multimedia on the Web
http://www.w3j.com/5/s3.nielsen.html

Response Time
Many multimedia elements are big and take a long time to download with the
horribly low bandwidth available to most users. It is recommended that the
file format and size be indicated in parentheses after the link whenever you
point to a file that would take more than 15 seconds to download with the
bandwidth available to most users.... [snip]

The 15-second guideline in the previous paragraph was derived from the basic
set of response time values that have been known since around 1968. System
response needs to happen within about 10 seconds to keep the user's
attention, so users should be warned before slower operations. On the Web,
current users have been trained to endure so much suffering that it may be
acceptable to increase the limit value to 15 seconds. If we ever want the
general population to
start treating the Web as more than a novelty, we will have to provide
response times within the acceptable ranges, though.

<end snippet>

That said, I think most WWW users will wait more than 10 seconds if
*something* is happening [ie, they can see a download occurring].

I still subscribe to the "hold your breath" test, however. ;-)



Kathy


Kathy E. Gill
AT&T Wireless, NBO Deployment
Redmond Town Center, Bldg 4, 3155B
425.580.6459
mailto:kathy.gill@attws.com

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