LONDON, UK – Canadian wireless carriers received high marks for its consumer mobile video experience, ranking ahead of all other countries in North and South America, including the U.S., says mobile analytics company OpenSignal.
As a follow up to last month's State of Mobile Video Report, OpenSignal is now drilling down into the specifics of various regions, starting first with the Americas. Canada and Bolivia lead the Americas in the video experience analysis, with scores of 59.9 and 55, respectively, on a 100 point scale, landing both countries firmly in the Good category of video experience scale. The U.S. fell into to the Fair (40-55) category with a score of 46.9.
Derived from an ITU-based approach for determining video quality, OpenSignal's video experience metric calculation uses picture quality, video loading time, and stall rate to rank the video experience on a scale of 0-100. A Good score falls within the 55-65 range and generally means that video streamed from the internet to a phone or tablet renders at low and high resolutions but exhibits longer loading times before playback begins and some stalling, especially at HD resolutions. A Good rating is just below Very Good, which is the highest rating achieved by any of the 69 countries analyzed in the video report.
All three of Canada’s big operators maintained a high level of video experience and ranked within the Good range, though the report awarded a slight edge to Bell and Telus who earned video experience scores of 61.40 and 61.91, respectively, which is statistically a tie. Rogers was close behind with a score of 57.86.
While network speed appears to be a distinguishing factor between the three, OpenSignal said that consistency of speed also plays a key role, noting Bell and Telus' slight advantage over Rogers in 4G availability recorded in its last report in August.
“In Canada's case, speeds across all of the operators have gotten fast enough that even a huge advantage in average throughput only produces a minimal increase in video experience”, reads the report. “What we're likely seeing is a bunch of other factors in play. Network latency is a big one, as the faster a request makes its way to the server and returns content to the device, the sooner the video begins playing. In our Canada report, we found that Bell and Telus had average 4G latencies at least 6ms lower than Rogers.”
