Impact of technical and Content Quality on Overall Experience of OTT video

Abstract

Quality of Experience (QoE) is a crucial guiding factor for network management of an end-to-end service session. The network provider can control the resources allocated to sessions and in doing so, influence the Technical Quality (TQ), which covers the technical aspects of signal quality during the session. On the other hand, the network provider has no control over the Content Quality (CQ), which pertains to the user's level of interest in a particular video. Together TQ and CQ influence the Overall eXperience (OX) in a session. In this paper, we present results from a user subjective study in which the impact of TQ and CQ on OX was investigated for Over-The-Top (OTT) video sessions from the perspective of a network provider. This perspective places a focus on those elements of QoE that can be controlled by the provider. Various studies have shown that very high interest in a content can strongly influence QoE independent of other factors, so our study uses videos that are neutral with respect to content. We assess the TQ, CQ and OX for video sessions that contain Integrity impairments (in the form of image freezing) and failures in terms of session Accessibility and Retainability. Our findings indicate that TQ and CQ have a strong impact on OX in the presence of impairments, but no failures. On the other hand, TQ is the main determinant of OX when failures are present.