Video quality degradation on IPTV networks

In IPTV streaming, issues of entire frame losses limit the use of state-of-the-art video quality analyses techniques. We present an experimental evaluation of degradation in video quality when streaming different types of video in an IPTV scenario. The PacketStorm network emulator is used to emulate real IPTV networks as detailed in the ITU-T G.1050 recommendation. Our results show that in the face of equal network impairments, videos with different characteristics showed different levels of resilience in terms of net frame losses. Particularly, low bit rate videos showed more resilience to frame drops as compared to high bit rate videos. Our analysis considers different types of content (with variable spatial and temporal complexity) and encoding schemes. We found that MPEG videos perform better than QuickTime videos in all the IPTV network severity levels recommended by ITU-T.