Ensure Stellar Viewing Experiences with Comprehensive Video Streaming Testing

The COVID-19 pandemic has notably boosted the demand for live and on-demand video content, which led to an increase in the OTT market share. A couple of years ago the worldwide OTT market size was estimated at $121.61 billion, and by 2027 it’s expected to reach $1,039.03 billion.

As more and more operators are launching and extending their OTT service offering, how do you make sure you stand out from the crowd? To attract as many eyeballs as possible and retain them, your OTT solution should not only provide cutting-edge functionality, but also exceed viewer expectations in terms of quality.

Comprehensive video streaming testing is what you need to reach this goal. Read on to find out how you can meet the highest OTT quality requirements.

Guaranteeing seamless operation

You can’t be sure your OTT platform can deliver top-notch viewing experiences without function-testing it, i.e. validating the solution against the functional requirements. This way, you’ll ensure glitch-free operation of every OTT component, including functionality like EPG, time shift, recommendations, and sharing.

Functional testing is also key to verifying complex business rules and OTT workflows such as content ingestion, encoding, transcoding, editing, management, playout, monetization, and more. And comprehensive testing of multi-screen apps — including STB and smart TV testing — will help you make sure your solution perfectly operates on every platform and resolution.

Rigorous functional testing can not only help you check that everything functions as expected and address glitches that might hamper user experiences, but also reveal unanticipated issues.

Improving OTT performance

It’s no new that a website’s load speed matters. According to Neil Patel, 40% of users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. And with video content, the stakes are much higher. Every second counts, and your clients will opt for competitor service if your content doesn’t start streaming within 2 seconds.

Buffering is one more aspect that can make or break your solution. To deliver top-notch viewing experiences and grow the client base, buffering should be reduced to zero. For that to happen, conduct comprehensive video streaming performance testing. Load and stress testing will help you determine the stability of your platform under peak traffic and reveal the causes for bad performance, including network, firewall, or router issues.

Online video performance

Also, to reveal weak elements of your solution’s architecture, pay particular attention to testing multi-CDN setups and streaming protocols. Among other key metrics to track is bandwidth, buffer fill, lag length, play length, and lag ratio.

How we can help you

Underpinned by multi-year OTT testing expertise, Oxagile solves the most complicated OTT quality assurance challenges. From video streaming load testing to security testing to localization testing, we’ve got you covered.

Enhancing quality of experience

Quality of experience (QoE) testing is another method to ensure smooth viewing for audiences of any size. This way, you assess your OTT solution’s quality from the end user perspective — through parameters like service accessibility, retainability, and integrity.

Namely, this type of service quality verification through video streaming tests includes testing an array of performance metrics:

• Network congestion, jitter, edge caching
• Start time and startup speed
• Average bitrate
• Bandwidth usage
• Rebuffer time and the likelihood of buffer
• Resolution of the video stream

Another aspect that needs prioritization is playback. You can track OTT quality of experience with extended playback testing — by tracking the rate at which playback failures occur during video streaming and by analyzing hundreds of video playback condition combinations.

Besides checking performance aspects, pay heed to testing UX, UI, and layout management. This will help you ensure great QoE across devices and platforms.

Enabling rock-solid security

Personal customer data, premium video content — these are two major reasons why you need to prioritize security testing when building your OTT platform.

Any component of your solution, whether it’s custom code, third-party libraries, or integrations, might be prone to an attack. Penetration testing will help you detect any kind of vulnerabilities — like broken authentication, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, memory leaks, etc. — and proactively address them. With advanced vulnerability scanning tools, you can automatically identify potential threats in your network devices such as firewalls, routers, switches, and servers.

OTT security testing

Among other testing types that are key to ensuring video and user data security is content targeting testing, media encryption testing, payment gateway testing, authentication and authorization testing, as well as data privacy compliance testing.

Ensuring product localization

If you want to get a competitive edge on the OTT market and expand your business to new territories, adapt your platform to the requirements of specific regions with localization testing. This usually means not only going beyond language barriers, but also validating an array of other key aspects:

• Date, time, currency formats
• In-app terminology and error messages
• Video subtitles
• Dropdown and data entry fields
• Bulleted and numbered lists

Besides, all-around l10n and i18n testing will help you make sure the functionality that is not applicable to a particular locale will be automatically hidden.

Revamping OTT solution quality with comprehensive QA

You won’t be able to deliver outstanding viewing experiences if your OTT solution’s quality is not verified with robust video streaming testing. Operation, QoE, performance, security, flexibility — satisfy the highest quality requirements around these key aspects and beyond with experienced QA engineers.