Differential QoE in Picture-in-Picture Gaming Videos: A Subjective Study

Video streaming continues to be the largest service delivered on the internet. This includes gaming videos, delivered both on-demand and live, where gaming footage is usually accompanied by a video of the player overlaid on top of the gameplay - resulting in Picture-In-Picture (PiP) content. Currently, PiP content is usually combined into a single video before being delivered to the client via technologies such as HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS). In this study, we investigated the QoE importance of gameplay and player elements in PiP gaming videos by varying the video quality of these elements individually. We conducted a subjective study, testing nine quality permutations based on three quality levels across three pieces of content from different gaming genres, with 30 participants recruited using an ethical crowdsourcing platform. We found that gameplay was significantly more important in terms of overall QoE, while the player element made a difference in only a few cases.