A comparison of HAS behavior in the high definition and ultra high definition context

Video content represents majority of the data available on the Internet. Streaming services like YouTube, Vimeo, NetFlix and others generate more than 60% of the overall Internet traffic, according to recent studies. This results in high demands on the quality of the broadband connection. The user usually wants to get the highest media quality, no matter the quality of the connection. This is where the HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) comes into the game. This service enables to maintain the highest media quality possible to offer the user the best quality of experience (QoE). In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of streaming Ultra HD video content using HAS. We evaluate the difference of the QoE for HD and Ultra HD streaming with High Efficiency Video Coding. For this purpose, we created a database of HEVC coded videos of different contents. These were then used in five different HAS scenarios (sudden quality change at the end, sudden quality change in the middle of the sequence, moderate quality changes, gradual quality drop-down and constant high quality for benchmark). HAS sequences were then used in assessed subjective quality test. According to the results, the Ultra HD outperforms the high definition in the terms of perceived subjective quality when used in HAS.