Unlocking Customer Loyalty Through OTT Monitoring: Why QoE Beats QoS in Video
The telecom industry has entered a new era, one where customer loyalty is won or lost not by price wars, marketing campaigns, or even customer support excellence, but by something far more fundamental: the experience your subscribers enjoy every day across the apps and services they rely on.
And in today’s world, that means video. At the end of 2024, video traffic accounted for 74 percent of all mobile data traffic (Ericsson Mobility Report, June 2025).
Streaming apps, including YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, TikTok, and Instagram, now dominate broadband traffic. Yet, despite this, many operators still rely on traditional network-centric KPIs – such as latency, jitter, throughput, and packet loss – to evaluate service quality, including video.
There’s just one problem: These metrics do not reflect what the customer actually experiences when it comes to OTT video and social media services.
Why Traditional QoS Falls Short in a Streaming-Focused World
When we ask subscribers why they choose or leave a provider, network experience is consistently the top reason responsible for nearly 40% of switching behavior. Therefore, it should be one of the key priorities for operators. However, here’s the twist: Network Quality of Service (QoS) is no longer equivalent to perceived quality when it comes to video.
A user can have “good speeds” and “low latency,” yet still suffer from:
- Long video start times
- Sudden freezes (stalling)
- Blurry picture quality
- Slow-loading social media feeds
The result? Dissatisfied customers and higher churn, even when your network appears perfectly healthy on paper. Why? Because modern OTT delivery is deeply complex:
- Content is delivered through Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) with dynamic server selection
- Player algorithms balance video quality versus startup time
- Adaptive bitrate (ABR) reacts to moment-by-moment network conditions
- Peering quality matters more than “raw speed”
In short, Quality of Experience (QoE) has become decoupled from QoS. This is where many operators get blindsided.
The MOS Advantage: Turning Complexity Into Clarity
In a world where operations teams are overwhelmed with dashboards full of alarms, KPIs, and raw metrics, it’s increasingly difficult to understand which issues truly impact customers. This is where the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) becomes transformative.
Unlike traditional metrics that describe a specific dimension of a video session, MOS provides a holistic, human-centric score that represents how a real user would judge the overall experience. It is grounded in standardized ITU-T P.1203 algorithms, which combine multiple technical factors, including initial loading delay, stalling duration, quality switches, buffer behavior, and displayed resolution, into a single, interpretable value from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent).
What makes MOS so powerful is that it:
- Models actual human perception, not just network behavior
- Normalizes diverse KPIs into one consistent score across devices, platforms, and video services
- Works reliably for ABR streaming, web-embedded video, and modern social video formats
- Achieves correlation levels above 0.80 with real subjective viewing tests, giving operators confidence that the score represents reality and not a proxy
This turns MOS into the most actionable and trustworthy indicator of user happiness available today.
The Thought that Every Operator Should Take Away
For twenty years, our industry has been engineering networks to be measurable.
The next twenty years will be about engineering networks to be felt.
We have moved past the era where throughput charts can predict customer happiness.
We now live in the era where simulated user journeys and MOS models define whether customers stay or leave.
OTT video quality is no longer a technical metric. It is the new battleground for customer loyalty. And those who embrace QoE monitoring today will be the operators who win tomorrow, not because they deliver the fastest network, but because they deliver the most consistent and reliable human experience.