Sandvine Dashboard Shows Real-Time QoE

Sandvine has added a real-time entertainment dashboard to its library of network-analytics dashboards. The new dashboard provides business intelligence that is particularly relevant to streaming audio and video traffic from providers like Netflix, YouTube and Spotify, including measurements regarding the quality of the video experience, the viewing duration and the associated revenue generated by the adoption of over-the-top services.

Other solutions in the marketplace measure video byte consumption, which is the product of factors like video resolution, codec and duration, combined with the number and duration of videos actually viewed by subscribers. Sandvine’s real-time entertainment dashboard measures and reports on these fundamental metrics individually, providing insight into the quality achieved per network location, per time of day, and per device type, leading to more informed network operations decisions.

Sandvine’s real-time entertainment dashboard quantifies the subscriber’s Quality of Experience (QoE) using a patent pending QoE metric based on observable factors, like start latency, buffer stalls, resolution downshifts due to lack of bandwidth, as well as resolution compared to the capability of the device.

Network test and measurement probes typically measure transport quality only, using metrics like signal-to-noise ratio at a limited number of network locations. By contrast, Sandvine’s latest dashboard leverages the entire subscriber base as a distributed network, with full coverage, generating new data-points every time a video is watched. Interim reporting is provided during the lifetime of the video, in order to assess transient quality issues. This granular data can be used to isolate quality issues localized to particular network segments; to determine if quality degradation is the result of a network issue or if only associated with particular video services; and to measure video adoption in terms of minutes and hours.