Proposed Assessment for Quality of Experience of Live IPTV in Home Environments

As the speed of networks that subscribers can use has greatly increased, demand for high-quality broadcast content, such as from Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and Video on Demand (VoD), is likewise increasing. Therefore, while broadcasters are increasing content and channels, they are striving to improve consumer quality of experience (QoE) to differentiate themselves from competitors, including by producing higher physical-quality content. Recently, subjective measurement methods have been internationally standardized as the most reliable approach for measuring and evaluating IPTV QoE. However, a majority of these methods are performed in experimental environments and are based on the extremely brief viewing period of approximately ten seconds using original reference videos. It is actually difficult to apply standard evaluation methods based on a ten-second viewing interval to assess real broadcast watching of IPTV or other services that involve a longer time (i.e., more than thirty minutes). In this paper, we therefore propose a method that accommodates actual viewing environments. Using the mean opinion score, we experimentally analyze the effects of evaluation interval changes under actual conditions in which IPTV service is provided. In addition, we propose improvements by applying the results into actual live broadcast IPTV service and by analyzing consumer service QoE.