Keeping Track of Video Quality

In a recent poll, 90% of operators surveyed said monitoring the end user’s video experience is critical to the success of the business, but few companies are tracking the quality of what consumers actually see in the home.

Instead, 61.9% of the operators said they learn of in-home quality issues when customers call in to complain. Those calls may be responsible for 80% of all complaints to customer-support centers, they said, adding that service quality is the second highest reason for customer churn. (High cost is the top reason consumers quit cable.)

Despite the importance placed on the quality of the end-user product, only 31% of executives polled said they have software in place to discover quality issues before it becomes a consumer complaint. The product prompting the highest number of consumer complaints today is video on demand, according to those polled. Gary Croke, director of marketing, quality of experience assurance for San Jose, Calif.-based Symmetricom, said consumers have high expectations for the high-bandwidth content they try to view on-demand. The most frequent complaints are about video that appears in blocks on the screen; video freeze and blackouts, according to executive responses to the survey.

Methodology: The information was gleaned through a survey by Multimedia Research Group, which polled 31 executives at the manager level or higher, at nine of the top 20 multiple-system operators. The survey was commissioned by Symmetricom, which sells end-user monitoring systems to video providers.