Bridging the Gap between QoE and User Engagement in HTTP Video Streaming

On video streaming platforms, users expect a high Quality of Experience (QoE). In contrast, service and content providers aim at high User Engagement, most notably because their revenue is usually dependent on it. In order to satisfy users, it is critical to know how QoE is related to the User Engagement. However, no model for this relation exists yet. Current approaches to managing QoE are usually based on traffic analysis. However, this will become more difficult in the future since the encryption of Internet traffic progresses. In this paper, we present an approach to bringing QoE and User Engagement together with video streaming as the use case. We do this by fitting existing measurement data of User Engagement to obtain a model. Furthermore, we extend the existing queuing model for QoE and investigate the correlation between QoE and User Engagement in a simulation. Hereby, we model different scenarios where we quantify network bandwidth and video requirements. Our results show that there is a strong correlation between QoE and User Engagement. Additionally, we observe that simple buffer policies, which do not rely on buffer information, can still perform well. These revelations open the way for new approaches to QoE Management in the future Internet.