SSIMWAVE Live Sports benchmarking headed for IBC 2022

Using actual live streams of major international sporting events SSIMWAVE will show at IBC 2022 how its award-winning products can provide streaming providers with the video quality insights and competitive comparisons they need to make strategic decisions to manage and optimize subscriber satisfaction and engagement.

Expanding on SSIMWAVE’s ongoing analysis of sports telecasts, the IBC exhibition (1.B10) will show how quality varies among sports streaming video providers. Experiences are ranked using the SSIMPLUS Viewer Score, the most accurate metric for predicting Viewer Experience. Streaming providers can use the results to decide what video technologies to deploy as well as how to optimize content processing and operations in order to improve competitive positioning.

Some services have stood out from the rest. Peacock consistently registered SSIMPLUS Viewer Scores (SVS) above 80 across three opening-weekend Premier League games:  (Arsenal vs. Crystal Palace, Liverpool vs. Fulham, ManU vs. Brighton). In recent evaluations of the French and Hungarian F1 Grand Prix events SSIMWAVE also has measured a high commitment to quality from F1 TV, with SVS of 80.2 and 79.5. 

However, the live sports video quality benchmarking of multiple providers also has shown that:

In many cases there are large gaps between the SVS scores of the best and the worst streaming services, and sometimes even between the best and the next-best. F1 TV and Peacock for example, have been far ahead of any other F1 or Premier League providers, reflecting a commitment to service quality.

Even the services that performed better with average SVS above 80 had a lot of variability inside their delivery – video quality ranging from low 50s to high 80s SVS. This can cause lower subscriber engagement as the stark quality contrast between different parts of the live stream can annoy and frustrate sports fans.

Not enough is being done to prevent impairments that can seriously damage viewing experiences. For example, interlacing, which occurs when recorded objects move fast enough to be in different positions when each individual field is captured, was present for half of the F1 race in one of the provider’s streams, making it unwatchable.

‘Consumers are less likely to stay engaged with video that is difficult to view, especially when they can easily compare the same live sports content delivered by different platforms – many of which offer free trial options’, said Dr. Abdul Rehman, CEO and Co-Founder of SSIMWAVE.

‘Our goal is to be a catalyst for change around viewer quality so that quality-minded providers can gain a competitive edge, giving viewers access to better sports video experiences’, added.

At IBC 2022, SSIMWAVE also will be showing its two NAB Product of the Year winners, SSIMPLUS LIVE Monitor (2022) and SSIMPLUS Video Quality Dial (2021). SSIMPLUS LIVE Monitor helps content providers quickly and automatically resolve issues that impact subscriber satisfaction, retention, and monetization. 

LIVE Monitor assesses viewer experience at scale using the only quality metric that is correlated to human vision, enabling it to trace video quality from content creation to consumption while improving mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 85%. SSIMPLUS VQ Dial can enable video providers to achieve multi-million-dollar savings in delivery costs per year while delivering “Just Right” levels of video quality across entire VOD asset libraries. IBC 2022 will be held Sept. 9-12 in Amsterdam.