Who Is The Best video operator in North America and Europe? A good question no doubt, and the answers can be found at the 2020 NAB Show in Las Vegas. Last September, Witbe, the leader in Quality of Experience monitoring, had released the sixth edition of its QoE Snapshots: “Who Is The Best video operator in North America and Europe? Part 1”. This article is the first part of a new Snapshot series dedicated to finding the best multi-service operator (MSO) or service provider in Europe and North America! Part 1 is focused on one of the most important uses of an operator’s Set-Top Box (STB): watching live TV and changing channels. While using Witbe robots we measured large discrepancies in channel change time between service providers in Europe and North America. Part 2 will present an overview of the video quality on each platform. Part 3 will analyze the side effects introduced by triple-play services and RPHY infrastructures.
North America
  • Altice Optimum One
  • AT&T Uverse Bell Fibe Comcast Xfinity
  • Cox Contour DTA DirectTV
  • Dish Hopper
  • Rogers Ignite
  • TV TWC Spectrum
  • Verizon Fios
  • Videotron illico
Europe
  • Bouygues BBox
  • Brandt DVB-T BT UHD Canal + Cube
  • Free Revolution Orange Livebox
  • SFR Box
  • Sky Q Mini
  • Telefonica Movistar Virgin V6
  • Vodafone Portugal
The Witbe robots are hosted on Witbe Cloud in 10 cities across North America and Europe: Denver, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Montreal, New York, Paris, Phoenix, San Jose, and Toronto. They monitored QoE KPIs such as Channel Availability and Channel Change Time as well as Witbe VQ-ID events – Witbe's proprietary algorithm for detecting severe video and audio quality deteriorations. More than 350,000 channel changes were performed using Witbe new Channel Change engine which includes reengineered perceptual and network algorithms, a dynamic scheduling system, and a new visualization widget in Datalab – Witbe restitution interface for fault finding, root cause analysis and advanced analytics. To read the full results of the Snapshot, and discover who are the best-in-class for channel change time, please visit Witbe blog. As a reminder, the Witbe QoE Snapshots test digital services to make information available to the market on the true Quality of Experience delivered internationally, just as consumer reports test products and publish overall quality analyses. These QoE Snapshots should not serve as benchmarks nor as rankings of operators by service or by device. Rather, the goal of these QoE Snapshots is to provide a global overview of digital services with multiple configurations, and in various environments. The previous QoE Snapshots published by Witbe have focused on: a drive test of mobile operators around London, the quality of experience of Super Bowl LIII, and the best OTT apps for Apple TV in the United States, all available on Witbe blog.
About Witbe Leading innovation in the Quality of Experience (QoE) industry, Witbe offers an award-winning approach to monitor the QoE delivered to users of any interactive service (telephony, video, web), on any device (PC, smartphone, STB), and through any network (fixed, mobile, OTT). Since its foundation in 2000, Witbe has continually grown and is now trusted by more than 300 clients in 50 different countries. Broadcasters, Operators, Content Providers & App Developers, all rely on Witbe robots to ensure flawless services. Witbe is a public company listed on Euronext Growth (ALTWIT.PA) and has offices all around the world, including locations in Paris, New York, San Jose, Denver, Montreal, London, and Singapore. It will be showcased at the 2020 NAB Show. Visit Witbe during the 2020 NAB Show at booth # SU9717. For more information, visit www.witbe.net.