Begin with the End in Mind: A Unified End-to-End Quality-of-Experience Monitoring, Optimization and Management Framework

There has been an increasing consensus in the video distribution industry that the design and operation of the full video delivery chain needs to be driven by the quality-of-experience (QoE) appropriate to the end-user. In practice, however, this is an extremely difficult task, largely due to the lack of effective mechanisms to instantaneously measure or predict every viewer's QoE. Moreover, existing quality assurance methods operate independently at different points along the delivery chain, reporting partial, inopportune, and incoherent measurements. This siloed structure leads to a fragmented understanding of the resulting video as it moves through each stage of the delivery network from the acquisition point and head-end down to the media data center, the network, and eventually the end-user's viewing devices. Here we propose a new framework that uses a unified end-to-end solution to produce consistent QoE scores at all points along the delivery chain under the same evaluation criterion. This is a framework that produces a clear picture instantaneously to operation engineers, managing