Quality of experience shapes brand perception. If a video is slow to start, buffers during playback, or suffers a noticeable drop in resolution, it can quickly erode trust, result in negative reviews, and drive subscribers away. Bitmovin’s 8th Annual Video Developer Report found that nearly 20% of video providers struggle to deliver a consistent quality of experience, while more than 24% find it difficult to identify the root cause of playback issues. Without the right visibility into performance, even a minor disruption can lead to a lasting impact on viewer satisfaction and retention.
The same report shows that it takes most video developers between 12 and 24 hours to identify the root cause of a playback issue. Traditional approaches rely on post-issue analysis and user-reported errors, which are too slow to protect the viewer experience at scale. The delay between a playback issue occurring and resolution leaves providers exposed, especially during high-profile events or peak viewing periods.
Understanding the Quality Challenge
Viewers expect seamless playback across any device, whether it’s a phone, tablet, smart TV, or set-top box. To meet this expectation, video services must support an expanding mix of platforms and hardware configurations, all while accounting for different operating systems, browsers, and firmware versions, which creates a complex testing environment. Manual testing is slow and expensive, while automated testing requires a lot of effort to stay current with evolving streaming protocols and codecs.
This is where viewer-side metrics become essential. Backend systems may report that everything is operating normally, but that doesn’t help when a user is stuck buffering or receives a lower resolution than expected for their device. Metrics such as startup time, buffering frequency, playback resolution relative to screen size, and error types, offer far more meaningful insight into real viewing conditions.
"Viewers expect seamless playback across any device, whether it’s a phone, tablet, smart TV, or set-top box.
These data points allow teams to move beyond generalized performance assumptions to understand what users are actually experiencing, across all devices and environments.
The Case for Real-Time Observability
Observability is frequently used in the IT industry to identify, diagnose, and resolve issues in real time, yet in video streaming, it remains underutilized. Many providers still rely on static dashboards or user complaints to surface problems, creating a lag between failure and resolution.
As the video ecosystem becomes increasingly fragmented, this reactive approach falls short. Ensuring a seamless viewer experience requires deeper, real-time insight into how video performs at the session level. That means moving beyond averages and aggregates to understand the specific conditions that impact playback quality as they happen.
Forward thinking streaming teams are beginning to adopt this model of granular, actionable visibility. With the ability to detect anomalies early, isolate root causes, and correlate quality issues across environments, they’re shifting from firefighting to prevention, reducing churn and improving satisfaction. Analytics platforms are helping make this shift possible by embedding observability into the heart of the video workflow to help providers scale diagnostics and accelerate resolution.
Enhanced Visibility = Higher Quality Streams
To deliver video in the best possible quality, service providers also need to optimize video encoding. And to do this, providers need to understand how content is performing in the real world, across devices, networks and regions. Relying on fixed bitrate ladders can lead to quality issues, especially when viewing conditions vary as much as they do today. If video providers can access metrics such as download speed, resolution changes, and the bitrates actually being delivered, they’re much better equipped to work out where the viewing experience is falling short.
Another key aspect of delivering a quality viewing experience is ad playback. Issues such as stalled playback, buffering and blank screens can quickly ruin the viewing experience. However, ad performance can be difficult to monitor, especially with server-side ad insertion (SSAI), where these issues can often go undetected. To address this, providers need tools that make it possible to track how ads are really performing, so that ad playback issues can be spotted and resolved quickly.
Raising the Bar
Viewers today have high expectations and little patience for playback issues. Most will abandon a stream within seconds if it buffers, crashes, or the quality drops, and many won’t return after a bad experience. To meet these expectations, video providers must account for a wide range of variables, including device type, screen size, connection quality, geographic location, and user behavior.
Observability enables teams to manage this complexity by monitoring key playback metrics as they occur. This gives providers the clarity and speed needed to resolve problems before they affect the viewer. The services that succeed won’t just be the ones delivering popular content, they’ll be the ones delivering it flawlessly, every time, on every device, without users ever noticing the work going on behind the scenes.
