David Cotriss at the Daily IPTV blog has posted a story called, "IPTV: It's All About the Quality." In this post, there is an interesting discussion by Steven Hawley, senior analyst at Multimedia Research Group, in which he goes into the three nested concerns for IPTV quality:
"A discussion of 'QoS' in an IPTV context is actually three separate but nested concerns: Video Quality (VQ), which refers to the video content itself – conformance to color and resolution benchmarks, which in many cases is mandated contractually by the content owner; Video Quality of Service (V-QoS), which refers to the error-free video delivery from the operator’s facilities to the customer premises over the broadband wide-area network; and Quality of Experience (QoE), which refers to the overall IPTV user experience, including application responsiveness, functionality, usability, and the service context that surrounds it."
In the piece, Hawley elaborated on the technical challenges associated with retaining customers for any IPTV service:
"To prevent the customer from defecting to a competitor (churn), the operator has to pay careful attention to technical factors across the deployment – which is best viewed as an IPTV delivery ecosystem. There are technical factors in all parts of this ecosystem. The complexity of the ecosystem makes it very expensive to implement, so to minimize capital equipment and software costs, IPTV operators assume an oversubscription model – in other words, they must deploy enough equipment to serve under 'average' conditions, yet recognize statistically-determined peaks, rather than design the deployment for full-time peak capacity.
Part of the solution for managing the complexities of IPTV deployments is to "build in" quality from Day One. An integrated service assurance solution helps IPTV operators manage customer expectations by staying in front of potential bottlenecks and being able to pinpoint problems quickly when customers do call. And, endpoint monitoring all the way to the CPE can help diagnose issues for specific customers. With IPTV, quality is THE major issue when discussing customer retention and reducing churn.
The blog posting offers some other great information, so please take the time to check it out.
Author: Author name | posted@ Tuesday, July 10, 2007 11:54 AM
