Multimedia Quality of Experience (QoE)

8 Conclusions

Tasos Dagiuklas¹, Luigi Atzori², Chang Wen Chen³ and Periklis Chatzimisios⁴

¹Hellenic Open University, Greece

²University of Cagliari, Italy

³State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

⁴Alexander Technological Educational Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece

It is a matter of fact that QoE is central in the design, creation, provisioning, and management of current and future multimedia services, especially when these are provided over the Internet, which is the most common case. The time it takes for a video-on-demand service to start playout, the number of stalling events experienced during a video streaming service, the resolution of the pictures shown on a social network site, how different images are combined in a news portal and the type of content they convey, as well as many other system factors, all impact perceived quality. However, not only are system factors important but also those belonging to the human, context, and business domains. Indeed, the mood of the user, the expected quality, and the place where the service is consumed are some elements that should be taken into account when estimating user perception and inferring consumer willingness to keep paying for a service or move to another provider.

Unfortunately for the service providers and fortunately for the researchers working in the field, there is a lot to be done to reach a satisfactory level of understanding on how to perform the estimation and manage it. Even the definition of this novel ...