Alone or together: measuring users' viewing experience in different social contexts

In the past decades, a lot of effort has been invested in predicting the users’ Quality of Visual Experience (QoVE) in order to optimize online video delivery. So far, the objective approaches to measure QoVE have been mainly based on an estimation of the visibility of artifacts generated by signal impairments at the moment of delivery and on a prediction of how annoying these artifacts are to the end user. Recently, it has been shown that other aspects, such as user interest or viewing context, also have a crucial influence on QoVE. Social context is one of these aspects, but it has been poorly investigated in relation to QoVE so far. In this paper, we report the outcomes of an experiment that aims at unveiling the role that social context, and in particular co-located co-viewing, plays within the visual experience and the annoyance of coding artifacts. The results show that social context significantly influences user’s QoVE, whereas the appearance of artifacts doesn’t have impact on viewing experience, although users can still notice them. The results suggest that quantifying the impact of social context on user experience is of major importance to accurately predict QoVE towards video delivery optimization.