Enhancing Video Stream Quality Measurement: Active Test Clients vs. Network Layer Analysis

In today’s hyperconnected world, where streaming video has become an integral part of our daily lives, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and content providers are engaged in a relentless battle to deliver top-notch video experiences to their customers. However, traditional methods of monitoring video stream quality from the 2000s have found themselves become useless due to HTTPS encryption.

As ISPs strive to ensure seamless streaming, they’ve come to realize that merely measuring encrypted network traffic falls short in providing a true assessment of the viewer’s experience. So, how can ISPs and content providers truly gauge the quality of the videos their customers watch? The answer lies in a measurement setup that puts itself into the position of the viewer. In this post, we explain the background, discuss the solution of encrypted stream monitoring, and finally unravel our technology. We explore why we believe this to be the best possible video quality assessment method and provide some real-life examples. Are you sitting tight?

Let’s dive in.

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Don’t Let Churn Cost You: How Streaming Providers and ISPs can Boost Revenue with QoE

It’s good to know when your customers are happy.
It’s absolutely required to know when they are unhappy.

Some Head of Customer Retention during the last meeting

Nobody likes to lose customers. But to prevent that from happening, you have to know what drives churn, and how to avoid it. In this article we focus on why customer churn matters, and how to use QoE measurements to provide predictive maintenance and reduce churn. We crunch some numbers to demonstrate how much impact a small improvement in customer retention may have.

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QoE and SLAs: How to optimize the right metrics

If you provide an Internet-based service, it is crucial to ensure a high level of availability and quality for your users. Providers have always used Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to define criteria for uptime, latency, and other aspects of quality that can be measured from an application or network perspective.

However, as services become more complex and users demand higher levels of quality, it is becoming increasingly important to also consider user perception in the form of Quality of Experience (QoE). In this article, we’ll explore why combining QoE and SLAs is a perfect match for ensuring optimal service delivery to end-users, and how Surfmeter can help you define and meet your own criteria based on the actual users’ experience.

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Now Shipping: Google Lighthouse Web Metrics

There was a time when it was enough to wait for a “load” event to know that a web page was loading. This is no longer the case. As websites become more complex — through media assets or interactive elements — it’s no longer easy to determine the user experience for a browsing session. As part of our vision to provide a single platform for measuring quality of experience, we now support Google Lighthouse web performance metrics. Read on to learn more!

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Mobile Video Quality Measurements with Surfmeter

While video streaming traffic is growing globally, the amount of time spent watching video on mobile devices and smart TVs is increasing year on year, according to various studies. Desktop usage remains stagnant. To understand the quality of video streaming on mobile devices, we need a dedicated solution that gives us detailed insight into the performance and quality of experience of video delivery. Read on to learn more about our new Surfmeter Video Quality SDKs for Android!

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New Surfmeter Demo Video — Quality Measurements in Docker

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Are you looking for a comprehensive video quality measurement software that helps you ensure quality for your customers? Look no further – AVEQ’s Surfmeter solution is here! In this demo video, we will show you how easy it is to use Surfmeter to measure video quality, web performance, speed tests, and other kinds of network measurements in real-time.

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How LambdaTest makes it easy to run Browser Automation

At AVEQ we’re measuring the performance and quality of web pages, including those that play video. It’s in the nature of those pages that they constantly change — be it minor CSS updates or complete overhauls. To ensure that our measurement solutions keep working as intended, we perform regular tests on those websites to see if anything has changed.

We used to do this manually, which was quite time-consuming and tedious. But then we discovered LambdaTest, a cloud-based cross-browser testing platform that made it easy to automate our tests. In this post we’re going to show you how it saved us plenty of time — and how you can use it.

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Adventures in Building Multi-Arch Docker Images with Chrome/Chromium

Docker is great – run the same code on all machines, no setup needed. So they say. But once you go beyond simple Dockerfiles, things start to change.

We recently had the, uhm, pleasure of trying to dockerize Chrome, ideally with support for DRM content. We thought it would be easy — grab the latest version from Google, unpack it, and done. But it turns out there’s a little more to it than that. Especially when you build for multiple architectures. Because now, there’s not just amd64, there is also arm64 (for Apple Silicon Macs) and armv7l, which Raspberry Pi uses (sometimes called armhf).

In this post, we are going to explore what is needed to create a multi-arch Docker image with Chrome (or Chromium). If you want the TL;DR version: Use Chromium and Debian, which makes it possible to build multiarch images.

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Network Performance Tests made easy with our QoS Dashboard

If you are operating a network or serving your traffic over different networks, ensuring performance and stability is likely one of your most important goals. Our Surfmeter Analytics Dashboard allows you to set up various visualizations of network and service performance, with possibilities to compare across different networks, regions, devices, or services.

In our previous post, we already showed you how our Analytics Dashboard can help you analyze the Quality of Experience of video streaming services — but we also offer in-depth metrics on underlying network performance. In this post we’ll focus on other metrics:

  • Web browsing speed
  • Ping & DNS performance
  • Speed test results / throughput

… as well as the various customizations that are possible with our Dashboard.

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