A comparison of solutions to measure Quality of Service for video streams

Sammanfattning: There are more and more people watching video streams over the Internet, and this has led to an increase in companies that compete for viewers. To improve the users experience, these companies can measure how their services are performing. The aim of this thesis was to recommend a way to measure the quality of service for a real time video streaming service. Three methods were presented; to buy the information from a content delivery network, extend existing analytics software or build a custom solution using packet sniffing. It was decided to extend existing analytics software. An evaluation was made on which software to extend. Four solutions were compared: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Ooyala IQ and Piwik. The comparison was made using the analytic hierarchy process, comparing each alternative in their performance in criteria such as API maturity, flexibility, visualization and support. The recommended software to extend when building a real time video streaming service is Ooyala IQ which excel at flexibility and is easy to implement into existing solutions. It also had great capacity, offering no limit on how many events it can track per month, and finally it offers great dedicated support via telephone or email.