A Subjective Comparison of Broadcast and Unicast Transmission Impairments

In this paper we describe a subjective test we have performed with 60 viewers over the age of 18 and 570 young students, the majority being 10 or 11 years old, to understand the relative annoyance caused by various transmission impairments when viewing television content. We wanted to compare errors associated with broadcast and multicast delivery which appear as areas of extreme color or tearing of the image, with errors associated with Adaptive Bit Rate unicast, such as interruptions and quality variations. We also wanted to study the impact of the type of screen the content is viewed on, considering viewing on tablets and on a TV. We have found a significant level of consistency over all of the results we have collected. Interruptions were the most annoying impairment, with multiple short interruptions being more annoying than a single longer one, and with missing content being more annoying than simply pausing. We found more tolerance to quality variation on tablets, and found that younger adults are more annoyed by impairments on tablets and older adults more annoyed when watching on the TV. We have found the young students to have similar views to the adults, and have found them to be capable of participating in subjective tests.

Published

2018-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Video signal processing, High definition, Subjective quality assessment, Quality of experience (QoE)

DOI

10.5594/M001847

ISBN

978-1-61482-960-7