Earning trust is at the core of Brightcove’s efforts to grow our leadership position in the streaming technology industry. That’s why we launched QoE Analytics, a suite of features focused specifically on Quality of Experience (QoE). There’s no better way to build trust with our customers than helping them monitor our performance in the arena where it matters most: the viewing experience.
Why Monitor QoE?
Quality of Service (QoS) and QoE are often lumped together, which can seem like a lot for many media companies to take on, both in complexity and cost. However, they are fundamentally different. QoS focuses on key network performance metrics at an operations level, while QoE provides a sense of the viewing experience from a user perspective.
We believe that QoE is more meaningful and often more actionable for most media companies, given the direct correlation to user satisfaction.
What QoE Metrics Are Important?
Brightcove collects a massive amount of data on behalf of our customers. This allowed us to narrow our QoE measurements down to the ones with the most significant correlations. We then cross-checked these findings with our own research team as well as several leading media companies who have studied this carefully. Based on this, we believe the following four metrics are the most important to track over time.
1) Video start time
Video start time measures the average number of seconds elapsed between the play request and the stream start. High start times correlate with abandonment before streaming even starts and can indicate issues with the CDN, player plug-ins, and initial stream bitrate where intervention makes sense. Low video start times mean your audience is watching video quickly, which is what they expect.
2) Stall Rate
Stall rate is the average number of stalls per hour, calculated by comparing total stalls to total hours viewed in the selected time range. Unlike other rebuffering events, video stalls directly affect playback. This can manifest as single stalls of significant length or frequent stalls of varying length. Thus, a low stall rate means smoother playback and a better viewer experience.
3) Error Rate
Error rate is the percentage of all play requests with errors preventing playback (as opposed to background errors the viewer doesn’t notice). These errors typically occur before playback begins, but they can also happen during playback. Low error rates mean that customers are usually able to watch the content they select.
4) Upscaling Time
Upscaling time measures the average number of seconds per hour of viewing that is spent in an upscaled state. Upscaling occurs when a video rendition is streamed at a lower resolution than the playback device can display, often resulting in fuzziness or pixelation. This is particularly noticeable when a lower resolution stream is played on a large-screen device. Low upscaling time generally means your viewers are enjoying smooth, crisp video playback.
While upscaling time is critical in monitoring quality of experience, there are times when it may not affect the viewer. For example, upscaling often happens when high resolution content is streamed to a 4K TV but not encoded at 4K. Since most viewers won’t notice this, it’s important to dig into the data to determine the reasons behind low upscaling times.
What Dimensions Affect QoE?
QoE metrics can be affected by a number of different factors, from mobile app updates to content delivery network (CDN) changes. Breaking down those metrics by different dimensions makes it easy to compare performance and identify issues and opportunities.
Device Type
Looking at metrics by device category allows you to see device-specific issues and trends over time. The imaginary example below shows a spike in error rate for Android devices that could be correlated to a recent app update.

Stream Type
By comparing the QoE metrics of VOD against livestreams, you can isolate mode-specific issues or trends. In the fictional example below, there was a jump in upscaling around a live event that resolved quickly.

Player
Looking at QOE metrics broken out by player is a great way to isolate player-specific issues. For example, there can be significant differences in load time, depending on the plugins that load at play request. There can also be issues in specific players that result in increased error rates. Seeing these differences makes them easier to isolate and act on.
Country
For customers who operate internationally, viewing QoE metrics by country can assist in isolating regional issues. Imagine a media company adopted a new content delivery network for their Asian consumers. From the example below, it’s clear that the CDN underperformed when looking at the stall rate.

QoE Analytics in Context
To properly track trends, it’s also important to see metrics and dimensions in context with each other. For example, Brightcove’s QoE solution not only provides charts for each metric, it includes a table with all metrics for a more comprehensive view. In addition to the key metrics, it also includes view count, video resolution breakdown, rebuffering time, and average bitrate for additional context.
The table is sortable by any of the columns and responsive to dimension selection, making it easy to explore and identify outliers. In the fictional example below, the device dimension was selected.

Quality of Experience You Can Trust
On most days, Quality of Experience reporting will be a testament to the high quality video streaming that Brightcove is known for. However, issues can arise and we want to ensure that we’re helping our customers see them. This is a big step forward in our mission to be the most trusted streaming technology company in the world.

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The internet and streaming have democratized the landscape of video creation and distribution on a broad scale.
Creators can produce and distribute video to the masses with little or no cost. Major film, TV, news, and sports producers can reach their audiences much more directly. Even brands are beginning to share their stories with their audiences through video.
But something else is emerging and defining itself adjacent to these trends: the producer economy.
The Democratization of Video
The democratization of video has been facilitated by three things.

Mobile evolution. It put a computer connected to the internet in everyone’s hands.
Connected TV explosion. It put the internet in our living rooms and has us engaging in a different, mostly passive lean-back capacity.
Social media revolution. It connected us all and made it a conversation instead of a monologue. Many-to-many, versus one-to-many.

We now have much broader access to all types of content, including content from our friends, from influencers, from creators. All on-demand, all the time, via the internet. As a result, three significant trends have coalesced over the past decade.

Creator economy. Anyone could express themselves, share it socially, have an algorithm amplify it, and make money on it via automated advertising on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Streaming wars. As new streaming platforms like Netflix were born, they stepped in between studios and networks and combined those into one. Eventually, every media company followed rather than be disintermediated.
Brand wave. Brands and companies initially jumped on board the social media train, some with video. Now they’re beginning to build robust, video-first content strategies to tell their stories.

Each of these trends began because democratization allowed them to bypass traditional middlemen and reach consumers more directly.
For example, look at the music business and independent musicians like Macklemore or Doja Cat. They honed their craft, created amazing work, released it directly, got discovered, and built a following—all through YouTube.
YouTube creates massive amounts of value for many artists and creators, but is it truly democratized? Or did the music industry trade a certain type of middleman, a label, for another one that’s based on algorithms and programmatic advertising?
The Twilight of the Creator Economy
Creators have had a good run. Millions are out there, and thousands of them are making real money.
With most major social platforms, those revenue-sharing agreements come out to roughly half for the creator. This makes sense for small upstarts building their audience. There are no technology costs, no marketing costs—they can just launch it. And if you hit the social graph and the algorithm just right, the money follows.
But not everyone can be Mr. Beast and build billion-dollar businesses. Further, it’s not clear that those large YouTube audiences can help creators do what Mr. Beast has done and launch other businesses, like his burger chain. It’s more likely that creators will need to diversify.
To insulate themselves from changing algorithms, content guidelines, monetization policies, and other fluctuations, what if creators built multi-channel businesses across multiple platforms on social media? What if they created their own direct-to-consumer channels, from apps to FAST channels?
The Future of Creating is Producing
Here’s where the producer comes in.
Producers generally supervise a production and are responsible for raising the money and hiring the artists, technicians, staff, and other resources needed to stage it. But we might expand this a little: Producers are now the creators of the creator economy.
They’re the showrunners and creators of major TV shows. They’re the film directors. They’re the CMOs deciding how to represent their brand in videos distributed broadly on social media. And they’re the production team inside your company making videos for internal and external use.
What the internet and streaming have done is create the ability for all of these producers to have a voice and real agency in the distribution of their stories.
So if you’re a producer with meaningful brand awareness and audience following, what’s holding you back? The audience is there. The technology is there too.
Streaming is a robust market, but it can also change quickly. A platform can update an algorithm any time, changing the audience. A funder of content can cancel a show and move on to the next one. (Just ask all those one- or two-season-and-out creators on Netflix). Brands need to tell their stories with video content soon, or they won’t have the customers they have today.
Producers can own their content and their distribution and monetization too. It’s not just for Hollywood anymore. Creators can do it. Companies and brands can do it. All of these producers have the opportunity to reach their audiences on multiple platforms, including directly. This is the producer economy, where producers own their own digital future.
[Watch the full episode on PlayTV.](https://www.brightcove.com/en/resources/resource-center/videos/dawn-of-producer-economy/ “Stream “The Dawn of the Producer Economy” on PlayTV”)

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