How to take action on real-time Quality of Experience (QoE) and error analytics

Proactively Optimize Your Viewers’ Experiences

How to take action on real-time Quality of Experience (QoE) and error analytics

Viewer experience is everything when it comes to video streaming. Content providers will be trapped in a frustrating cycle of declining viewership if they don’t have full insight into stream performance. Beyond impacts to viewer loyalty and engagement, the lack of visibility also makes it incredibly difficult to optimize streaming services and deliver the high-quality, error-free playback experiences audiences demand.

To provide a flawless playback experience with reliability, video service providers need:

• Real-time, comprehensive error analytics
• In-depth Quality of Experience (QoE) troubleshooting
• Enhanced benchmarking that goes beyond stream viewer counts

Lack of critical error analytics can impact viewer loyalty and engagement, making it difficult to optimize services.

When a stream buffers endlessly or fails to start, viewers and content providers are both left in the dark. Instead of filing a support ticket, viewers usually abandon content and move on. This silent churn erodes at audiences over time and leaves media engineering teams in a difficult position. Media and broadcast engineers will struggle to diagnose and fix problems without clear, actionable data. The result is a reactive approach that is both costly and inefficient. 

This cycle of guesswork devotes valuable resources to replicating intermittent issues instead of optimizing the core media infrastructure. Organizations that build custom video experiences to maintain branding and data control do so at the expense of visibility. This critical vulnerability makes it nearly impossible to scale services reliably, guarantee a high-quality viewer experience, and protect the bottom line.

Real-time, comprehensive analytics end the cycle of frustration.

To confidently deliver a high-quality stream from start to finish, content providers need complete visibility into any and all potential errors viewers may face. By pinpointing issues before they reach wider audiences, media providers can take a proactive approach to optimizing the viewer experience.

Using Wowza Video’s built-in QoE analytics to pinpoint potential issues and solve problems before they reach a larger audience.

In Wowza Video’s Analytics, media professionals, engineers, and system architects can track critical metrics, trends, and errors. With easily-configurable filtering and visualizations, this tool provides an at-a-glance dashboard for Quality of Experience (QoE) and stream error analytics.

These analytics pages track crucial viewing error analytics in real-time, including:

• Video start time
  • Measures the time from when the user clicks play until the video actually starts
• Rebuffer count
  • Measures the total number of times a video stream pauses to buffer during playback
• Rebuffer time
  • Measures the total duration during which video playback is interrupted to load additional data

Video start time is a crucial metric for measuring the first impression a viewer has of your content. A shorter video start time indicates a more seamless, quicker, and responsive viewing experience. Rebuffer count and rebuffer time are important analytics around anything that could be negatively impacting the viewer experience. Whenever the video player runs out of data and has to stop to load additional content, this counts as a rebuffering event. Rebuffer time measures how long it takes for the player to load that additional content. This causes the player to pause and load, likely due to network or bandwidth limitations. 

A slower or less smooth viewing experience hurts loyalty and engagement. Each time a viewer experiences buffering, and the longer each buffer duration takes, the more likely it is that the viewer will ultimately leave entirely. If it takes the player too long to load the content after the user hits play, they may not end up watching any of it at all.

Another two QoE analytics metrics included in Wowza Video are:

• Error density
  • Measures the average number of errors per playback start
• Error-free sessions
  • Measures the percentage of sessions with no fatal errors across any stream before or during playback

Error Density goes a level deeper, providing insight into the frequency of errors every time a stream is played (both at initial start and any resume events after pauses or rebuffering). If there are no fatal errors before or during playback, it is considered to be an error-free session, which can be used as a high-level benchmark for viewer satisfaction.

By diligently tracking these analytics, media providers can pinpoint potential issues before they impact a larger audience. Having these real-time insights available in one place opens many potential avenues to optimizing content delivery and ensuring reliable, high-quality stream delivery.

Stop reacting, take a proactive approach to content delivery

Having the analytics is the first, albeit critical, step towards optimizing stream delivery. Content providers need to integrate benchmarking with these insights to understand how and where to make refinements. Then, organizations can transition from reacting to issues as they happen to making proactive choices that grow viewership.

Poor QoE can have a detrimental and long-lasting impact on viewership, especially if the factors affecting it are not addressed. These factors could include poor network conditions, streaming at too high a resolution, not preloading content in the player, or ads that increase buffering time. To improve in these areas, address key playback and buffering challenges by restricting the maximum resolution on specific devices, enabling preloading, setting the initial playback quality, enabling adaptive resolution based on network conditions, and considering removing ads (especially pre-rolls, which may be increasing buffering and video start times).

How new benchmarking in Wowza Video helps improve performance and optimize stream quality.

When it comes to Quality of Experience (QoE), benchmarking is non-negotiable to ensure viewers have the best possible experience. Wowza Video has this built into the QoE tab of the Analytics page, with customizable thresholds and clear visual indicators, and contextually-relevant pop-up messages calling out potential issues before they hit a wider audience. Now, you can take proactive steps towards optimizing the viewer experience.

• Enhanced performance benchmarking
  • Robust industry standards and best practices built directly into the platform
  • Based on 20 years of broadcasting and streaming media experience
• Clear visual indicators
  • Green/Yellow/Red color-coded benchmark range indicators 
  • Provide instant insights on performance based on specific thresholds
  • Guided in-platform messages provide steps to fix key errors

Gain full visibility with real-time insights on QoE and stream performance.

Whether you broadcast to millions on TVs, smartphones, and tablets or deliver secure video behind your corporate firewall, a failing stream means you’re failing. Viewer Quality of Experience must come first, and only real-time error analytics and QoS/QoE insights keep you ahead. With decades in broadcasting and streaming, Wowza combines its expertise with robust error reporting and benchmarking in Wowza Video to give you the tools, insights, and confidence to deliver content on your terms. If you’re ready to take a proactive approach to QoE and deliver a flawless stream, Wowza Video is here to help.

   

For technical documentation and more information on these features, visit our Release Notes page https://www.wowza.com/docs/wowza-video-release-notes-2#august-6-2025