Factors Influencing Quality of Experience

In this chapter different factors that may influence Quality of Experience (QoE) in the context of media consumption, networked services, and other electronic communication services and applications, are discussed. QoE can be subject to a range of complex and strongly interrelated factors, falling into three categories: human, system and context influence factors (IFs). With respect to Human IFs, we discuss variant and stable factors that may potentially bear an influence on QoE, either for low-level (bottom-up) or higher-level (top-down) cognitive processing. System IFs are classified into four distinct categories, namely content-, media-, network- and device-related IFs. Finally, the broad category of possible Context IFs is decomposed into factors linked to the physical, temporal, social, economic, task and technical information context. The overview given here illustrates the complexity of QoE and the broad range of aspects that potentially have a major influence on it.