December 19, 2000, 4:30 PM — Everyone knows what it means when you say it takes 5 seconds to download a Web page. When you try to measure streaming audio and video quality on the Internet, a flood of factors arrives. Factors like late and lost packets, rebuffering during playback, bandwidth delivered and bandwidth received add to the complex mix of measurements to evaluate the overall streaming audio and video quality.
Furthermore, streaming content itself is complicated:
Multiple technologies are involved (Real, Windows Media, QuickTime).
By definition, streaming content isn't subjected to the delays associated with downloading very large rich media files to a storage device. More time-sensitive than standard Web pages, streaming media is subject to significant performance problems caused by today's Internet infrastructure, causing jittery video and audio static. Still, online users expect the same smooth, uninterrupted audio and video they get from their television and radio.
Because you can't improve what you don't measure, streaming content providers need to monitor and measure their streaming performance. What follows is a guide about some of the factors involved in measuring streaming media.
Three major factors that affect streaming quality, which need to be measured, are startup time, audio quality and video quality. Within these factors are specific elements, such as connect time, redirect time, initial buffer time, video frame rate, recovered, lost and dropped packets, and bandwidth utilization.
1.Startup time:
The time it takes from when you press the play button until the clip begins. Startup Time equals the total time required for Initial Connection (including DNS & time to first byte), Redirection Time, and Initial Buffering.a.Initial connection: Time it takes to establish a Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) connection between the streaming server and the streaming client (or player).
b.Redirection: The time it takes to transfer data to the last server from a second and subsequent servers, to which the first server may redirect data.
c.Initial buffering: The time it takes to start viewing and hearing a streaming media clip from the time the data arrives in the buffer of the client computer.
2.Audio quality: Derived from audio encoding and audio delivery
a.Audio encoding includes the number of audio channels, bitrate per channel and quaility of original content.
b.Audio delivery includes the delivered bandwidth and packet delivery.
3. Video quality: Derived from video encoding and video delivery
a. Video encoding includes the encoded bitrate, encoded frame rate and the quality of original content
b. Video delivery includes the delivered bandwidth and packet delivery.
The higher the encoded bitrate AND its successful delivery to the user, for both audio and video, the higher the quality.
Two more pieces of the quality puzzle are encoding quality and delivery quality. Encoding quality is based on a complex set of decisiions and tradeoffs depending on the potential audience: how much to dedicate to video (including frame rate, window size, bit depth) and how much to audio (one channel mono, stereo, surround sound), video resolution, video frame rate, etc. The tradeoffs become even more difficult when the audience is going to be a mixed one (both dialup and high bandwidth).
For example, T-1 users can receive content up to 1.4M bit/sec, which comes close to supporting full motion video, but it is nowhere near DVD quality. Full screen/full motion, with near-DVD quality with stereo would require at least a 10M bit/sec stream, and the world is a long time away -- in Internet years -- of providing that kind of connectivity.
Still, very few companies are streaming even at the 1M bit/sec rate. Because most small business and broadband home users connect at DSL or cable speeds of 300K bit/sec or less (with the majority of home users still at 56K bit/sec dial-up or less), the "largest" content currently being streamed over the Internet is at 300K bit/sec. Most of the content is streamed at a far lower bitrate. At 300K bit/sec, there is no way that full screen video can be streamed without compromising frame rate, audio quality or video resolution.
Delivery quality includes bandwidth, packet and frame rate data:
