TV Connect Africa

More Quality of Experience than Quality of Service

One of the biggest challenges for all the players launching their OTT service is about quality of service.

Not only because of the competition, but also because OTT consumers are now paying subscribers that will no longer accept buffering and low video quality to watch their favourite shows. As soon as content is displayed on the TV, the expectations in terms of quality are significantly rising, reaching a broadcast-like level.

Today, video delivery over broadband and unmanaged network needs to be as smooth as “traditional” broadcasting. Quality of Service is then one of the keys to a successful OTT service.

While Quality of Service can often be measured – we have percentages defining the Service Level Agreement between a technical provider and its client – an experience is something customized where the acceptable will be defined from the customer’s behaviour and judgement.

In the end what you want to provide is rather more Quality of Experience than Quality of Service.

There are many criteria that define Quality of Experience when watching online video. Resolution may be the first one we think of, but the worst enemy of video streaming is buffering: stalls in the playback of their content are what consumers hate most. Although a video is delivered in 1080p, viewers will give up if it buffers too much.

Another issue that is crucial is the latency or stream start time. There’s nothing worse than an awkward moment when nothing is happening and the consumer is feeling he’s wasting his time. The longer for the video to start, the more likely the viewer will leave.

Quality of experience is more of a compromise. Viewers can be more tolerant with a lower resolution provided there are no buffering interruptions.

Let’s take an example:

If a service is interrupted during three hours between 2 and 5 o’clock in the morning, what would the customers think? Most of them probably won’t notice. What if this same service is interrupted for ten minutes, at 9:15 pm? If you fail during prime time, even for a few seconds, a fire is bound to start on your social network accounts. Quality of Experience is what really matters to the end user.

The best OTT viewing experience will offer the best resolution with no stalls, and achieving such QoE requires a perfect knowledge of the value chain delivering the content to the audience.