A new study, commissioned by a company that provides quality monitoring, identifies video quality as critical to the growth and success of IPTV and reports service providers don’t always have the tools they need to monitor quality.

Multimedia Research Group conducted the study for Symmetricom, which makes tools for video quality monitoring and diagnostics. IPTV service providers were asked about video quality monitoring, its importance to IPTV as a service and what is being done today to offer the service. The survey subjects were 12 IPTV providers, from the Tier One and Tier Two market segments.

Eighty-four percent of those surveyed said video quality monitoring is either a critical or a very important part of their video initiative, including 77% who said video quality is a main reason for customer churn and 78% who said video quality problems are a main reason for high volumes of customer service calls.

Further, service providers overwhelmingly said they learn of quality problems from the customer’s calls, meaning they weren’t able to take proactive measures when problems arise. More than 90% fell into this category. The other major problem service providers reported was that existing solutions do not take an end-to-end view of the network.

“Service providers understand the importance of video quality to their bottom line yet feel they do not currently have the right solution for monitoring and managing video quality from the content ingest point at the headend to the customer premises equipment (CPE) in the home,” said Gary Schultz, President and Principal Analyst of MRG, in a prepared statement. “This Symmetricom study strongly suggests that video quality is top-of-mind with IPTV service providers and a main driver for telco customer churn."

Among the problems reported by service providers, the primary complaint was an inability to get an accurate measurement of the end-user experience and the lack of an end-to-end monitoring solution, both of which were reported by 78% of respondents. Two-thirds also cited the need for a graphical user interface and reporting issues, while just over half cited OSS integration issues and the cost of monitoring.

Less than half of the 12 do deep packet inspection of their MPEG transport stream content and just over half said they didn’t do any MPEG analysis at all. About 40% of IPTV providers surveyed said they are primarily focusing their monitoring at the Layer 2 and Layer 3 level, looking for packet loss and jitter.