Introduction to the Special Issue on Measuring Quality of Experience for Advanced Media Technologies and Services

Progress in technology has led to a stunning increase in the quality of multimedia content over the past few decades: Ultra-HD or 3D displays have become affordable nowadays, and high-definition streaming is quickly replacing conventional media libraries at home as well as on mobile devices. At the same time, quality considerations have become a lot more intricate because of the additional complexities in content generation, processing, distribution, and display. The challenge of Quality of Experience (QoE) measurement is taking into account not only system performance parameters and content quality metrics, but also notions such as user perception, personality, satisfaction, expectations, and context. With the exponentially growing amount of media being produced, shared, and consumed, as well as emerging new forms of media technologies and services (e.g. light-field imaging, or advanced spatial audio), many challenges remain in developing effective and practical subjective and objective QoE measurement methods.