Impact of Advertisements during Channel Zapping on Quality of Experience

Nowadays various digital television services are available. However, the user of these services experiences longer delays than the traditional analog TV while switching from channel to channel. The digital TV operator usually displays a black screen with the channel number during zapping. However, it could be interesting for the TV viewer, if the operator displays a screen with information instead of just a black screen. This information may be an advertisement, information about the target channel, personalized content of the user etc. In this paper, we describe a subjective experiment where the quality of experience (QoE) of channel zapping was quantified, while displaying a random set of advertisement pictures during zapping. It is found that, for longer zapping times, advertisements give better QoE than the black screen. However, when zapping times are small,users prefer a black screen over a glance of an advertisement picture.