Quality of Experience management for video streams : the case of Skype

With the widespread adoption of mobile Internet, the process of streaming video has become varied and complex. A diversity of factors affect the way we perceive quality in video streaming (also known as 'quality of experience', or QoE), involving far more than the individual video and network characteristics. Quality is affected by the overall delivery context, terminal specifications but also human factors. It is thus very hard to control the streaming system as a whole, targeting QoE rather than the tuning of individual factors. To better understand the non-obvious relation between network parameters and the resulting video quality, herein we present an experimental assessment of a representative video streaming platform, Skype. We find that simple QoE-management heuristics are only effective in very specific cases (for instance in 'head & shoulder' video types), which suggests that a more human-centric QoE management will be required to further improve video delivery.