Spirent releases new solution to analyze quality of video streaming services

Spirent Communications has announced its enhanced Umetrix Video solution, now supporting the ability to test how well streaming video services are delivered over mobile networks and smartphones. The solution uses natural scene statistics and machine learning to determine a standards-based Video Mean Opinion Score (VMOS) that has been shown to correlate well to human perceptual scoring.

“Major mobile and over-the-top providers are increasingly competing on service quality, and video content is a key component in the customer propositions,” said Stéphane Téral, Executive Director – Research and Analysis, Mobile Infrastructure & Carrier Economics, IHS Markit. “And as more video is consumed by mobile subscribers, initiatives in video quality assessment and benchmarking will become more important to differentiate these propositions.”

According to the company, traditional approaches measure packets delivered to the user device to infer video quality. However, they often ignore how video is encoded, decoded and displayed on mobile devices. Other solutions rely upon a known reference video for comparison, and often require proprietary software to be installed on a smartphone, making them impractical for many use-cases. Spirent’s solution supports any mobile video service, analyzes the video content itself to detect artifacts such as blockiness caused by over-compression, and performs scoring without prior knowledge of the original video.

“Our mobile operator customers have asked us to help them solve the problem of how to automatically and realistically benchmark the performance of their video services,” said Saul Einbinder, Vice-President, Product Marketing, Spirent Communications. “Now, for the first time, smartphone or tablet OEMs as well as video service providers can discover how the network affects video performance and vice versa, especially as evolving video codecs are breaking the traditional fixed relationship between bandwidth and perceived quality.”

Spirent Umetrix Video is currently used by smartphone and chipset manufacturers, mobile network operators, and video service providers to qualify devices and prove in service readiness. The new Umetrix Video capabilities enable these organizations to compare their video performance to others, to explore bandwidth requirements, and quickly regression test device and software updates.