Video experience improves 30% over past 3 years

MANILA, Philippines — Video experience, or the quality of video streamed to mobile devices, in the country has improved by nearly a third in the last two years, according to independent mobile analytics firm Opensignal .

Opensignal in its latest analysis said users’ video experience in the Philippines improved by 30 percent to 46.4 points in the first quarter from 35.8 points in the third quarter of 2018

Video experience involves measuring real-world video streams, and takes picture quality, video loading time, and stall rate into account.

Opensignal said average user experience while streaming video has improved to the “fair” category since the third quarter of 2019 from the “poor” rating observed in the previous four quarters.

“Our users’ video experience has also remained fair despite the impact of the pandemic, indicating that operators’ efforts to ensure their networks would still support video streaming services despite the changes in usage patterns,” it said.

Latency experience in the country also posted an improvement from 75.4 milliseconds (ms) in the third quarter of 2018 to 60.6 ms in May at the height of the lockdown.

Latency experience represents the typical delay a user experiences when connecting across an operator’s networks in milliseconds or ms.

“Simply put the lower the score, the less of a delay our users will typically observe between doing something on their phone that has to go over the internet and observing the outcome,” it said.

At the operator-level, Opensignal said both operators have made significant gains, with Smart consistently scoring higher than Globe for video experience.

Smart’s video experience score improved by 26.3 percent from 42.4 points in the third quarter of 2018 to 53.5 points in the first quarter.

Globe’s score, on the other hand, rose from 29.2 points to 40.9, an increase of 40.1 percent.

“However, our Smart users saw more improvement in absolute terms than their Globe counterparts between the thirdquarter of 2018 and the 90 days beginning May 1 – with increases of 9.8 points and 7.9 points, respectively – though our Globe users still saw the largest improvement in percentage terms – 27.1 percent versus Smart’s 23.1 percent,” Opensignal said.

In terms of latency experience, Globe users saw their average latency improve by 15.8 ms or 20.6 percent between the third quarter of 2018 and the last quarter that included pre-COVID-19 data.

Opensignal said users on Smart’s network saw a more modest improvement over the same period of 12.7 ms or 17.2 percent.

“However, during the periods that were fully influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, Smart’s latency experience score continued to improve, while Globe’s started to rise. As a consequence, our Smart users observed a larger improvement (in both absolute and percentage terms) than their Globe counterparts,” it said.