Seeing is Believing and Vice Versa: Investigation of the Altered Perception during Subjective Assessment of Streaming Multimedia

Quality of Experience is one of the most important components in the definition of service value. The primary role of the subjective evaluation of multimedia service quality is to reflect the true satisfactory of users. However, these reflections may not carry the desired level of accuracy under specific circumstances. This paper presents how basic information regarding the service not only distorts mean QoE results, but also manipulates perception itself. The research utilized 7 different measurement scales for subjective assessment of the perceived quality. A total of 90 participants evaluated the streaming multimedia, but while 30 performed blind tests, a group of 60 were given minimal information regarding the type of connection and transmission security. The results contain the scoring patterns of the participants and also our findings on the expressive power of scales.