Measure the Viewer Experience

The Viewer Experience on linear delivery can be impacted by many factors within the video delivery chain; streaming presents even more challenges.

Each process, partner and solution provider has the potential to introduce experience-harming degradations including audio/video synchronization problems, macroblocking, banding, video freezes, latency and other issues.

With content production moving to HDR, it’s becoming even more critical to ensure your video delivery chain preserves the Viewer Experience and you have the tools to detect potential problems.

To inform valuable decisions and actions within the delivery chain, you need meaningful visibility into the viewer’s perception of quality at ingress and egress points.

Challenges

Unfortunately, getting this information has been difficult for a number of reasons:

• Measurements like PSNR, SSIM and VMAF don’t account for different bitrates, resolutions, devices and dynamic ranges (SDR and HDR);
• Some approaches (including SSIM and VMAF) aren’t suitable for live content;
• Other AI-based metrics are too narrow and must be retrained every time a new codec, format or content type is introduced;
• Pseudo-QoE measurements don’t capture the Viewer Experience—instead, they measure factors like packet loss but cannot reveal how the viewer’s perceptual quality is impacted;
• It’s unrealistic to have actual human “golden eyes” or MOS at every link in the chain;
• It’s difficult and time-consuming to correlate measurements from the delivery chain with statistics and user behavior from video players.