Quality-of-Experience Beyond MOS: Experiences with a Holistic User Test Methodology for Interactive Video Services

Interactive video services, like video telephony, social TV or on-line gaming, are about to become a significant part of the service portfolio for telecommunication service providers. As the future commercial success of these services will depend essentially on their end-to-end quality as perceived by the end user, appropriate Quality-of-Experience (QoE) measurement methods are of paramount importance. The aim of this paper is to provide an application-oriented re-evaluation of actual QoE metrics for these services and to design a test methodology for evaluating user perceived experience which goes beyond standard Mean Opinion Score (MOS) metrics. To this end, we describe a specific test scenario designed for assessing the currently recommended question sets from two ITU recommendations. We determine the goodness of fit of these question sets to the user perceived quality dimension. Altogether, the resulting reduced set of items (questions) provides a significant step towards a more realistic methodology for assessing audio-visual quality perception.