The famed physicist, Richard Feynman, often recounted a story from his youth about his father. They would walk together in the woods, and he would teach Richard about the birds in the forest. He would point out that this bird is called a “brown-throated thrush”. In French, it’s called a “l’oiseau brun”, in Chinese it’s called a “xiaoniao”, and so forth. But after learning all those names, you still know nothing about the bird. The way that we analyze video metrics often falls into this same trap, in which we learn the names of things but we fail to properly understand them. In this talk, I will review the major QoS metrics that everyone is familiar with, such as video rebuffering, startup time, watch time, and I will discuss the intuition behind some robust mathematical methods you can use to gain more insight into your data. When does a spike in startup time really matter, and when is it just random noise? How do you test changes in multiple metrics when you edit your encoding settings? How do you know when your statistics are lying to you? These might sound like hard questions, but with a greater fundamental understanding of video statistics, these questions and many others become much easier to solve. The brilliance of Feynman’s pedagogy was not the material he taught, but the tools he gave his listeners to solve broad ranges of difficult problems. I hope this talk will emulate that same effect for my audience. Presented at Demuxed 2019 in San Francisco.