At Streaming Media West in Los Angeles next week, SSIMWAVE will unveil a Player Test feature in its SSIMPLUS VOD MONITOR Inspector. Player Test is intended to enable content distributors to evaluate video player experiences remotely and objectively and to address subpar video quality issues.
The Player Test feature is designed to provide source-to-playout visibility - between any two points in the world - into how individual video files appear to the viewer, using the SSIMPLUS 0-100 scoring metric that mimics actual human vision. The SSIMPLUS score is intended to let streaming and on-demand content distributors see how network conditions such as bitrate, switches between variants and buffer sizes impact the viewer.
The Player Test is scheduled to be available before the end of 2019, initially evaluating HLS content delivered to players developed on the video.js framework. Support for additional players and video formats is slated to be available in the near future.
"There are countless data points that show what is happening in the network, but until now there has been no way to understand exactly what they mean to the viewer," said Dr. Abdul Rehman, CEO and co-founder of SSIMWAVE. "Our Player Test capability completes the picture by providing a simple, consistent score that shows how video quality has changed from source to playout, giving a clear indication of what the viewer sees."
SSIMWAVE's VOD MONITOR Inspector is a cloud-based tool that combines frame-by-frame and pixel-by-pixel analysis of video content with SSIMPLUS. Using the new Player Test functionality, distributors can achieve three-point monitoring - at the source; at the output of the encoder, transcoder or packager; and at the player output. The resulting data is intended to enable optimization of profile ladders, content variants and other variables without noticeably impacting the viewer experience.