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Impact of Gaming during Channel Zapping on Quality of Experience

Authors:
Robert Kooij
Michiel Geijer

Keywords: Channel Zapping; Quality of Experience; Mean Opinion Score; IPTV; gaming.

Abstract:
This paper belongs to a research program started in 2006, dealing with Quality of Experience (QoE) aspects of channel zapping. The program, which has relevance for the broader topics Quality of Service and Next Generation Networks, started with quantifying the QoE expressed as a so-called Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for situations when a black screen is visible during channel zapping. Based upon the observation that the QoE is (possibly) increased by showing information while the user waits for the target channel to appear, the program continued with assessing the QoE in case advertisements are shown during channel switching. In this paper, we quantify the impact on QoE when offering users an interactive game during channel zapping. Our subjective experiment shows that for zapping times greater than 2.25 seconds, offering games during zapping instead of the usual black screen, leads to a better QoE. For zapping times larger then about 3 seconds, the MOS for the ‘game’ scenario is larger than 3.5, indicating the onset to acceptable quality. For zapping times below 1 second, the MOS for the ‘game’ scenario is very low, indicating that it is a bad idea to show games in case of such short zapping times. The scenario where during zapping advertisements are shown is always outperformed by either the ‘black screen’ or ‘game’ scenario. For small zapping times, the ease of play is much too low. For instance, for a zapping time of 1 second, only 18% of the test subjects managed to play the game in time. For zapping times of 3 seconds the ease of play becomes higher than 80%. At zapping times of 5 seconds, the game score is as high as 82%.

Pages: 143 to 148

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: March 25, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4006

ISBN: 978-1-61208-186-1

Location: St. Maarten, The Netherlands Antilles

Dates: from March 25, 2012 to March 30, 2012