What is QoE and why it matters?
If your business is built on delivering video over the internet at scale, it only makes sense that any quality evaluation should start and end with the customer watching the product you’ve delivered — the viewer. Their opinion, at the end of the day, is the only one that matters. The customer, as the saying goes, is king.
Traditionally, however, quality metrics have been network-centric rather than viewer centric — largely focused on quality-of-service (QoS) rather than the viewer’s quality of experience (QoE).
Quality of service metrics have been defined by network service level parameters such as network throughput, package drop rate, video bit rate, and network delay, etc., and sometimes include integrity checks that indicate whether the videos and associated audio and caption information are properly reproducible at user devices.
These metrics are fine, as far as they go. They provide a ballpark idea about the general health of delivery networks.
What these metrics don’t do is make a meaningful predictions of viewer satisfaction, and they aren’t great at assisting in timely repair of video quality degradations or helping with allocation of bandwidth resources.
IMAX’s VisionScience™ technology starts and ends with the viewer’s quality of experience in mind. This achieves three things. One, it makes the viewer far happier. Two, it’s far more accurate. And three, it generates cost savings.
Unlike QoS, QoE is user-centric, directly measuring the acceptability, satisfaction, happiness or enjoyment of the end-user. In many scenarios, QoE makes substantially better quality predictions from QoS.
For example, the same video streamed to two users with identical network conditions who are using different viewing devices (e.g., TV vs. smartphone) could have identical network QoS scores but very different perceptual QoE.
Only IMAX’s QoE measures can produce reliable, immediate predictions of user satisfaction. Based on those predictions, quality problems can be identified, localized and fixed, and resource allocation, i.e., bandwidth, can be optimized, generating cost savings.
Bottom line? Focusing on the viewer’s QoE rather than QoS makes sense, both from the point of view of an end-user’s satisfaction, and from the point of view of cost.
