QoE analytics: Spot a frozen screen before your customer calls

Most operators don't have this view today: their monitoring watches the network, so a viewer who stared at a spinning wheel last night never shows up in it.

QoS measures the network, QoE measures the picture

QoS (quality of service) tells you whether your network and servers deliver the stream. QoE (quality of experience) is measured in the player and shows what the viewer actually sees.

The difference matters. On our largest installation, errors make up only about 0.3% of all events the players report. A stall or a slow start is usually not an error, so an error log never sees it.

Viewers do, in a 2012 study of 23 million views on Akamai's network, every second of startup delay beyond two seconds raised abandonment by 5.8% (Krishnan & Sitaraman, ACM IMC 2012).

Your whole service on one screen

The overview starts with one number: healthy sessions. A session counts as healthy when the picture appears, playback never stalls for a second or more, the picture is smooth and no fatal error occurs. Startup time is tracked on its own, and every start over two seconds counts as slow. On our largest installation, 94.4% of 14.5 million weekly sessions played without a problem, and fewer than 0.03% ended in a fatal error.

Next to it, you see where sessions are lost: starts without picture, slow starts, stalls, jerky picture and fatal errors. Every number can be broken down by partner network, platform, device, app version and channel. A new app release that slowed down start times is easy to spot.

From the whole service to a single viewer

Explore mode takes you from a channel to a platform, a device and finally a single playback session. A viewer complained on Tuesday at 21:03? You can open that exact session.

Support can enter a customer's ID and see whether the problem most likely sits in the device or in the network.

Alerts before the phone rings

The real-time view refreshes every 20 seconds. Key metrics are checked against thresholds. For example, healthy sessions below 85% raise a warning, and below 70% a failure.

The Alerts view lists every breached threshold and every unusual deviation from the last 14 days. Each morning, a plain-language summary tells you what got worse and why.

Instead of waiting for complaints, your team can detect and investigate playback problems proactively, often before viewers report them. That means fewer support calls, faster fixes and more satisfied customers.

How it works

The ModernTV player measures in the background. It sends a heartbeat every 60 seconds and reports stalls, slow starts and quality switches the moment they happen.

QoE Health is part of the ModernTV platform. It needs no third-party SDK, and all data stays in your own installation.

To see QoE Health working on real installations, request a demo.

FAQ