Case Study
Reimagining QoE through Automation
Reduction in QoE-related Customer churn
Platforms
Streaming Video Apps
Background
The number of video streaming users will reach 1.64 billion by 2027, showing the enormous popularity and need for streaming services. In this competitive industry, delivering a high-quality experience (QoE) is key for media streaming platforms to attract and retain viewers.
The customer is a leading broadcaster and telecommunications company based in the UK, offering entertainment, broadband and voice services.
Challenge
Our customer’s vision was to provide consistent QoE and world-class video experience to its subscribers. It aimed to automate the process of monitoring and measuring KPIs affecting QoE, across different devices and platforms under varying network conditions.
The key challenge in measuring QoE was two-fold:
- Creating real-world network conditions in the lab
- Accurately measuring the QoE KPIs
The customer sought to improve the turnaround time for QoE verification for stream, player and content changes. Specialized QoE specific algorithms had to be developed to track and monitor QoE KPIs from an end user perspective in real time.
Solution
Tata Elxsi embarked on the journey of test transformation based on its award-winning test automation platform – QoEtient
The most significant aspects are:
Validation of QoE KPIs as accurate as 60fps on real devices
- Smartphones, Tablets, SmartTVs, Streaming devices (FireTV, AppleTV, Roku, etc.), Gaming consoles (PlayStation, Xbox), and STBs
- All OS/Firmware, App, and Player versions
- Network controller module to simulate real-world conditions in the lab; it enables testing streaming performance under real network conditions in the lab
As part of this transformation program, Tata Elxsi helped the customer:
- Set-up a full-fledged QoE testing infrastructure capable of testing 200+ devices simultaneously, including TVs, Set-top-boxes, Smartphones, Gaming consolescapable of testing different bandwidth scenarios
- Integrate test automation as part of CI to enable quality check from early stages of development
- Automate testing of 16+ critical KPIs that affect performance
- Benchmark performance against competition
- Ensure key QoE KPIs were not compromised for major releases through QoE gating
Impact
Due to proactive improvement in QoE, the customer was able to achieve a 25% reduction in QoE-related customer churn over a year of deployment and enhanced revenue assurance.
Through QoEtient, it was able to reduce the time taken to fine-tune the encoder parameters from 8 weeks to under 3 weeks (~62% reduction)
QoEtient also helped in the early-stage detection and isolation of issues to prevent the degradation of streaming KPIs from getting into production.
Services rendered
Tata Elxsi
- Creating real-world network conditions in the lab
- Improving the turnaround time for QoE verification
- Automating, tracking, and monitoring QoE KPIs
- Delivering seamless video experience across different platforms