What does “good look like?”: Towards industry standards for measuring OTT video quality
The first phase was an extensive study undertaken on behalf of Akamai by Sensum into how we as viewers react to video quality; it focused on how quality of experience impacts commercial success. The resulting white paper demonstrated the impact of buffering, for example, on viewer engagement.
This new paper extends the broader project by asking what “good” actually looks like in terms of streamed video. Akamai worked with Eurofins Digital Testing to examine how the perceived quality of streamed video is impacted by a series of factors, including the video device or player, the content genre viewed, the encode profile and finally, the network conditions typically experienced by users.
The initial tests established the optimal profile per device and per content genre. The next tests introduced challenging network conditions — including bandwidth variance, packet latency, and outages — to determine their impact on these profiles. The final element was to analyse the key quality indicators, noting the significance of consistency of throughput — with less buffering on all devices at the highest bitrates.
In summary, the results provided a clear indication among optimal video fidelity, content genre, and viewing device, with screen size a notable factor. Noting the bitrates required and benchmarking against Akamai’s data on the state of the Internet across multiple territories, the results also showed that the current Internet infrastructure is capable of delivering high-definition complex video content to most viewer devices in most Western European markets with little or no buffering.