Investigating Quality of Experience in the context of adaptive video streaming: findings from an experimental user study

Although adaptive video streaming solutions have become very popular over the last years, only a limited number of studies so far have investigated Quality of Experience (QoE) in the context of such services from a real user perspective. In this paper, we present results from a user study (N=32) on adaptive video streaming QoE. Content (i.e., music video clips) was streamed on portable terminal devices (namely iPads), using different bitrate profiles which represent realistic bandwidth conditions. All users conducted the test in two different usage scenarios, representing different social settings. QoE was evaluated in terms of traditional QoE-measures and complemented with a number of alternative, affectivestate related measures. The findings indicate differences between the considered bitrate profiles in terms of QoE (traditional and alternative measures) and indicate that a lower, constant bitrate seems to be preferred over the changing bitrate which is on average higher. This is the case for both separate usage scenarios. Although we found no significant influence of the social setting when considering traditional QoE evaluation measures, some significant differences between both settings were detected when evaluating QoE in terms of delight and annoyance.