Image quality and channel change time and are central to TV service suppliers in today’s competitive market.
With its unique QoE monitoring technology*, Witbe carried out a study of digital SD TV services (via DSL, cable, FTTH, satellite and DTT), looking at 30 operators in 16 countries on 4 continents
France, 4 December 2008 -- The worldwide video quality for SD services, measured using Witbe VideoMOS algorithms, was 2.9 /5. Asian video quality measured from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore reaches 3.1, the same value as measured on the French market.
Witbe noted important variations between operators but also between technologies. Witbe distinguished amongst these factors:
o Encoding policies: In order to increase the number of eligible customers, Telco’s have to increase the compression ratio of the video, which reduces the quality (increase in blockiness and blur).
o The broadcasting technology: Cable video is usually less pixelated than IPTV as cable experiences less transmission problems (packet loss). DTT video is mostly characterized by frequent frozen images
(jerkiness) caused by interferences and weather conditions.
o The maturity of the services tested: services launched recently often have lower availability (black screens, error messages, channel change issues, …) and provide a poorer video quality.
o The decoder performance in terms of stability and quality but also the interoperability issues between CAS, middleware and STB
o The presence of intelligent retransmission mechanisms (eg Cisco VQE) or forward error correction which often improves video quality when there are burst errors on DSL lines.
Another study being carried out by Witbe on High Definition TV services shows that users perceive differently video artefacts. HD picture is usually less blocky and sharper than SD picture. On the other side, HD encoding policies are more sensitive to network issues than SD video. It is important to note that HD programs are not equal: Some broadcasts upscaled in HD show a much higher blur than broadcasts in native HD.
*dedicated to measuring delivered quality of TV services out of the set-top box.
Hello journalist, welcome to Scoopasia--a powerful online resource for media information in Asia. Scoopasia has press releases and media events for every beat and industry. All content on Scoopasia is 100% FREE. You don't even need to login!
Scoop Line (Instant Information Request) The easiest way to ask questions and request information from the PR community.
Advanced Search Drill down, dig deep, for media information the way you want it.