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Test the QoE for short-form videos
- 06 March, 2023
USA: New trends have resulted in short-form videos on social media becoming more popular with users than ever before, taking on the streaming video landscape once dominated by YouTube and Netflix. In an effort to keep up with the market leader TikTok, many established social media and streaming platforms have recently added a short-form video component: Facebook and Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Snapchat Spotlight all among them.
Measuring the Quality of Experience (QoE) that users are actually receiving while watching these short-form videos involves some unique challenges.
- Most videos are less than a minute in length and watched for even less than that.
- Users scroll seamlessly from video to video, meaning buffering is much more frequent than between episodes of a streaming television show.
- Short-form videos are watched on the go just as often as at home, meaning the service is expected to work equally well across internet connections and a large variety of mobile networks and settings (including 5G).
All of these challenges mean that short-form videos must be tested in a very specific way to capture true QoE. Witbe believe in the importance of testing and monitoring true video performance by using the same devices and networks that customers have at home. After a considerable time spent developing, troubleshooting, and perfecting the technology, Witbe are now testing and monitoring short-form videos with the same approach.
Witbe's completely integrated short-form video testing technology, powered by the Witbox+, uses the same mobile devices that regular users have. There’s no additional builds or integrations required to test the video service. Witbe also test in the specific region being considered and over a wide variety of available networks, both wi-fi and data, to get a clear picture of true video performance.
The technology automatically evaluates a few Key Performance Indicators of the short-form videos.
Some of the most important KPIs are:
- Short-form Availability: Whether the video the user clicks on is available.
- Short-form Buffering Time: How long videos take to load while scrolling between them.
- Short-form Quality: What quality the video streams at and how clear the picture and movement appear.
This new short-form video testing and monitoring technology will help video service providers, social networks, and mobile network operators understand the QoE their customers truly receive. Smartgate can even benchmark their performance against local and global competitors. It’s all to help provide superior short-form video watching performance, leading to strong word of mouth, increased retention, and happy customers.
To learn more about our new short-form video testing technology, contact Witbe today!
