WHITEPAPER
A pragmatic testing solution Delivering on the expectation of seamless user experience with OTT video streaming applications becomes a significant challenge for operators due to application variety and diversity, as well as their lack of transparency for testing. Furthermore, all the above must correlated against a backdrop of increased complexity in the mobile access technologies and the operator’s need to minimize OPEX. However, the continuously evolving complexity of OTT video streaming applications with ML-based proprietary codecs/clients/delivery protocols, and the increasing sophistication of devices with Ultra High Definition (UHD) displays, show fewer and fewer QoE problems. That is unless network problems, such degraded RF performance and/ or traffic congestion which can result in poor latency, jitter and loss, are experienced. The performance of the OTT applications is generally something that operators cannot control and/or manage. Therefore, operators need an OTT quality measurement which quantifies only the network impact component of the overall quality. It should be noted that the impact of the network is expected to be the most significant one. This is because the video content, the OTT application’s performance and the device are expected to have a low impact considering the technologies’ evolution in these areas, as discussed above.
There is therefore the need for an OPEX-efficient testing solution which is focused only on the network itself. The solution needs to enable operators to troubleshoot, optimize and benchmark their network to meet the minimum performance requirements to support demanding OTT video streaming applications while coping with their variety and diversity. This can be achieved with a pragmatic OTT video streaming testing solution which needs to satisfy the following criteria: • To run on-device, close to the user’s perception of the streaming quality • To support testing of a variety of OTT video streaming applications • To be consistent by providing perceived waiting time, perceived retainability and perceived video quality measurements agnostic to the OTT application • Provide video quality measurement with high granularity suitable for troubleshooting and optimization based on drive testing • Deliver video quality measurement to reliably reveal network-centric problems, free of the OTT application’s configuration (codec/client), video content, performance as well as the device’s performance
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