Intelligent video QoS assurance for Adaptive Streaming

New intelligent quality assurance technologies are needed to monitor Adaptive Streaming, which is used to deliver Over-The-Top (OTT) video. With patented and patent-pending technologies, IneoQuest has developed Veristream, a Quality of Service (QoS) assurance technology for Adaptive Streaming. VeriStream provides a simple and elegant video quality metric that is scalable and can quickly pinpoint instances of quality degradation in networks that use adaptive streaming.

The Challenges of Adaptive Streaming

Adaptive Streaming is a key technology enabling the spread of internet video. Adaptive Streaming changes the bitrate of the video stream according to bandwidth limitations. This improves video quality of experience (QoE) by increasing the continuity of video playback to the consumer. Instead of stopping the video and rebuffering, the video transitions into a lower quality and continues playing.

With adaptive streaming, the most critical impairments impacting video quality are re-buffering errors (when video cannot continue playing because the buffer has not reached an adequate length) and video skipping (when the video buffer is saturated and some segments are dropped before they can play). To maintain smooth video play, each segment should arrive by the time the previous segment completes its play out. This allows the new video data to arrive and be queued up with enough time to replace the video consumed. As can be seen from the image above, delays in the transfer of video files or file playback can impact viewer QoE.

How It Works

By analyzing these refresh and consumption rates, VeriStream provides the necessary information to detect and address all network-induced impairments that can occur in adaptive streaming. It provides an intelligent and proactive metric to ensure proper buffer management and continuity of video delivery. By summarizing the delay factor performance for the system and file transfer, VeriStream provides a single indicator of performance by categorizing the results in a numbered, color-coded index that is easy to use and interpret as shown by this performance table.