The time when we bought DVDs is somewhere behind. To watch your favorite movie or series, you need to go to the site or download a mobile application where you can find all the necessary videos for free or by subscription. Streaming media’s popularity is growing tremendously, but not all platforms offer their customers a high-quality product. You must conduct comprehensive testing to ensure that your site or app can serve many people.
Streaming media and key load testing metrics
Before conducting OTT testing which will help prevent and bypass quality losses and playback issues onto your streaming web platform or an app, let’s figure out which metrics affect the quality of the finished product.
Bitrate
The bitrate is always evaluated as the average number of bytes per file transferred to the end user. The higher this indicator, the more high-quality music and video the user will be able to receive, which means that he will be satisfied and return to your platform again. It is worth saying that the data transfer rate highly depends on the client’s location.
Playback speed
If the video or audio file does not load within the first 30 seconds, then the user is likely to abandon your platform and look for a place where it will be much faster. As a result, playback speed goes hand in hand with the number of views. If you want your site to be popular, you must take care of the playback speed.
Buffer time
Buffer time is the amount of time it takes to download content and is dependent on network latency and user data download speed. It shows how long the user spent waiting for the content to load. The higher this figure, the worse the impression of your platform, which means you will rapidly lose customers if you do not bring it back to normal.
Find out more about how to test user experience of OTT app to understand how convenient it is for customers to use your service, the shortcomings, and, most importantly, you will receive recommendations on eliminating possible problems.
Buffering can be very pronounced during video playback; the time between buffered content and media playback is the delay length. If this is violated, then during the video production, there will be delays that users do not like.
Playtime
If the client has watched your content to the end, he or she was most likely satisfied with such cooperation. Based on this, you can suggest similar video or audio files to watch, which will benefit your platform. But, if you notice that many users refuse to watch a movie within a few minutes after launch, they don’t like something, and you need to identify the problem. It is clear that if the percentage of such users is small, there is no point in worrying since this may be due to the internal circumstances of the clients. Still, if this figure has increased dramatically over several months, you are doing something wrong.
Delay factor
The latency ratio is the buffering time compared to the actual viewing of the content spent by the user. It is necessary to calculate the overall quality of streaming media. This indicator should be as close to zero as possible but cannot reach zero.
Why is it worth testing?
When it comes to Streaming Media, you need to look at the above metrics in dynamics. It should be understood that the number of people who visit such platforms on weekdays and holidays is very different. Also, when you make changes, only time will tell how correct they are.
Among the main advantages of dynamic testing are:
- Allows you to determine how the software works in different geographic locations;
- Allows you to identify errors not covered by statistical testing;
- Testing is carried out on all software from start to finish;
- Helps improve reliability and safety.
Particular attention should be paid to your product’s work in different geographic locations. The ISP gets back the request to dedicated servers that serve the chosen website, and the server gives a clear response that is sent back to your PC and generates the result. If your site is in North America and the client is in Asia, then the server response speed will be much slower, which can negatively affect the content playback speed. So, it would be best if you made sure that each of your servers has a lot of power to process requests worldwide. Some large companies solve this problem by opening small branches around the world. The new platform will have the same design as the primary resource in this case. Still, the server response time will be higher, and you will be able to add content in other languages, which will be of more interest to users from other regions.
