User-Perceived Quality of Service in Video on Demand Services

Abstract

Video on Demand (VoD) is an Internet service with a growing appeal to the mass market, and is of increasing importance to Internet service providers' revenue. This master's thesis presents a subjective assessment on the user-perceived quality of service of an imaginary VoD service. By implementing the SAMVIQ methodology of subjective video quality assessment, the state of the art video codec H.264/MPEG-4's resilience to packet loss is examined. Through the recreation of several residential usage scenarios, different amounts of packet loss is added to H.264/MPEG-4 content encoded at diversified bitrates. The results suggest that random packet loss rates above 0,1% deteriorates the perceived quality to such an extent that it is not acceptable to the end-user. High-bitrate encoded content is relatively more affected than low-bitrate content, and bursty packet loss is preferred to loss categorized as non-bursty.