LONDON, UK – Canada ranks within the top 30 countries for its consumer mobile video experience, ahead of the U.S. but behind countries such as Hungary, Spain, and Australia, according to a new report by OpenSignal.
The State of Mobile Video (September 2018) used over 87 billion measurements collected from some 8 million test devices between May 14 – August 11, 2018 to see how the mobile video experience stacks up. The report found that countries with the most sophisticated networks and the fastest speeds aren't necessarily those providing the highest-quality video-viewing experience. In the case of mobile video, faster isn't always better.
OpenSignal's video experience metric is derived from an ITU-based approach for determining video quality. The metric calculation takes picture quality, video loading time and stall rate into account, and ranks the video experience on a scale of 0-100.
Eleven of the 69 countries analyzed earned a Very Good rating, meaning mobile video loaded quickly and rarely stalled even at higher resolutions. Czech Republic was tops with a score of 68.52, followed by Hungary with 67.89 and Norway with 67.41. But even among those nations, no country achieved the highest video experience rating of Excellent, which requires a score between 75-100.
Canada ranked 30th with an overall video score of 59.93 on OpenSignal's video experience scale, placing it in the Good category. The United States fell in to the Fair category with a score of 46.84.
OpenSignal's analysis shows that video experience and connection speed are linked in countries where speeds are relatively slow, but once a country passes the 15 Mbps threshold in average overall download speed, the raw power of connections has little bearing on streaming video quality.
