Quality-of-experience of streaming video: Interactions between presentation quality and playback stalling

Network streaming video services have been growing explosively in the past decade, but how to measure and assure the video quality-of-experience (QoE) of end consumers is still an open problem. Poor presentation quality and playback stalling have been identified as the most dominant factors that degrade user QoE. Although both factors have been studied individually, little is known about the interactions between them. In this work, we first construct a streaming video database that contains compressed videos at different distortion levels and with different stalling patterns. We then carry out a subjective test to evaluate the QoE of the videos. The results reveal some interesting dependency between presentation quality and playback stalling. Specifically, playback stalling always causes QoE degradation, but the strength of such degradation depends on the presentation quality when the stalling event occurs.