Quality-of-Experience perception for video streaming services: Preliminary subjective and objective results

Quality-of-Experience (QoE) is a human centric notion that produces the blue print of human perception, feelings, needs and intentions while Quality-of-Service (QoS) is a technology centric metric used to assess the performance of a multimedia application and/or network. To ensure superior video QoE, it is important to understand the relationship between QoE and QoS. To achieve this goal, we conducted a pilot subjective user study simulating a video streaming service over a broadband network with varying distortion scenarios, namely packet losses (0, 0.5, 1, 3,7, and 15%), packet reorder (0, 1, 5, 10, 20, and 30%), and coding bit rates (100, 400, 600, and 800 Kbps). Users were asked to rate their experience using a subjective quantitative metric (termed Perceived Video Quality, PVQ) and qualitative indicators of “experience.” Simulation results suggest a) an exponential relationship between PVQ and packet loss and between PVQ and packet reorder, and b) a logarithmic relationship between PVQ and video bit rate. Similar trends were observed with the qualitative indicators. Exploratory analysis with two objective video quality metrics suggests that trends similar to those obtained with the subjective ratings were obtained, particularly with a full-reference metric.