Video Quality Tags (VQT)

Project Status:

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Working

The project is actively being worked on.

Start:

October 1, 2020

Estimated Completion:

October 1, 2021

Problem Statement

This project will help to further improve CDN’s video streaming detection, diagnosis & optimization capabilities by publishing a set of recommendations to add QoS and QoE-related metrics to the CTA WAVE’s Common Media Client Data (CMCD) CTA-5004 standard.

Project Description

  • The CTA WAVE CMCD standard, published in September, 2020 introduced a new set of player-generated video streaming metrics and a mechanism for players to communicate these metrics to upstream entities (e.g. CDNs) in-band, and in real-time, with the video streaming sessions. This has enabled CDNs to enrich their existing video streaming health visibility with the player perspective (e.g. rebuffer events).
  • The purpose of the Video Quality Tags (VQT) project is to further enhance the CMCD standard with additional QoS & QoE-related data points. CMCD has some QoS/QoE data, e.g. buffer starvation, bitrate, throughput. However, player-side has a wealth of additional QoS/QoE-related data points which are currently not included in CMCD CTA-5004.
  • The SVA QoE WG believes that these additional VQT-recommended data points will further help enhance the ability of player-upstream entities (e.g. CDNs), to detect, diagnose and optimize their video streaming operation, and thus, make video streaming better!

Project Type

Project Leads

Advisors

There are no SMEs associated with this project.

Goals and Objectives

  • Augment the CMCD (CTA-5004) standard with the newly proposed CMCD keys.
  • Enable additional diagnostic & optimization use cases for NOC/OPS/SREs.
  • Contribute to video streaming workflow observability & situational awareness capabilities to help detect and delineate issues between CDN’s upstream stakeholders (e.g. origin, transcode, encode) and downstream stakeholders (e.g. players).

Project Scope

  • Propose new CMCD keys focused on QoS / QoE aspects of video streaming.
  • Propose new CMCD-key-derived metrics focused on QoS / QoE aspects of video streaming.
  • Prove out new CMCD keys & derived metrics in SVA Labs POC (partner with SVA QoE Distributed Tracing POC).
  • Publish SVA Technical Document that proposes: 1) new CMCD keys, 2) new CMCD-derived metrics, and 3) NOC, Operational and SRE use cases that can leverage them.

Contributors

The following members have contributed to this project. Click on their name to visit their profile. If they have not published their profile, the link will redirect to their LinkedIn profile.

Additional References

Common Media Client Data (CMCD), CTA-5004, CTA WAVE, Sep 2020

Presentations

The following presentations delivered during Measurement/QoE working group sessions may provide additional information about this project.