Video quality of experience (QoE) analytics is software that measures every video stream while it is being watched, and shows the streaming service where viewers are waiting too long for the video to start, or where the picture freezes. Quality of experience means the quality as the viewer actually experiences it, not as the servers report it. Streaming services and broadcasters use it to find and fix problems while viewers are still watching.
How does it collect the data? A small piece of code sits inside the video player on every phone, TV and browser. Every few seconds, it sends a short report. The report says whether the video is playing or stuck, which quality is playing, which content delivery network (CDN) is sending the video, and which internet provider and city the viewer is in. The software combines millions of these reports into a live picture.
A few measures matter most. Video start time is how long a viewer waits after pressing play. The rebuffering ratio is the share of viewing time spent frozen, waiting for more video. The average bitrate shows how sharp the picture is, because a higher bitrate means a better picture. And exits before video start count the viewers who gave up before the video even began.
Consider a Sunday evening football match on a streaming service. At 8.40 pm, the rebuffering ratio for viewers in Kolkata on one internet provider rises from 0.4% to 3%. Viewers elsewhere are fine. The analytics software spots the rise within a minute, because it has learnt what normal looks like for that city at that hour. This method of spotting unusual readings is called anomaly detection. The dashboard shows that all the affected viewers are receiving video from one CDN. The operations team moves those viewers to a second CDN. By 8.47 pm, the rebuffering ratio is back to normal. Without the analytics, the team would have learnt about the problem from angry posts on social media.
The data is used later too. Engineers compare devices and find that one old TV model takes twice as long to start a video. Product teams check whether a new app version freezes more often than the old one. During a big cricket match, the whole live streaming at scale effort is watched on these dashboards.
How is it different from server monitoring? Server monitoring shows whether the service's own servers are healthy. QoE analytics shows what each viewer actually sees. A problem in the viewer's internet provider can only be seen from the viewer's side. These measurements serve every streaming service.