May 2017 – As pay TV providers and broadcasters transition from traditional services to multiscreen, they must also extend their video quality assurance (VQA) practices beyond MPEG video to include adaptive bit-rate (ABR) streaming to help them maintain or improve their competitive positions.
Written by tvstrategies principal analyst Steven Hawley and published in May 2017 by SNL Kagan (an S&P Global Market Intelligence company), this report provides an in-depth category analysis and global forecast for the Video Quality Assurance category, which includes video test, monitoring and analytics solutions
Several major technological transformations have had a direct impact on this category, including:
- The evolution of carrier and operator networks,
- The transition to internet protocol (IP),
- The emergence of more efficient video compression,
- Adaptive Bit-rate streaming, and,
- The increasing complexity of the video content itself.
Ultra-high definition (UHD) introduces an entirely new set of technical considerations to VQA. However, the UHD standardization process is at least a year away from completion, so VQA monitoring solutions remain a work in progress.
Many of the analytics solutions used for ABR delivery, designed to help operators better understand the behavior of subscribers are also suitable to assess video quality of experience.
VQA requires an ecosystem approach. Continuity of the overall consumer experience has become just as important as the quality of the video content itself, preservation of content integrity during transmission (QoS) and the perceived quality at the consumer device (QoE).
This report is available to subscribers of the SNL Kagan research service.