Digital TV: the effect of delay when watching football

Abstract

Hearing a neighbor cheer for a goal seconds before you see it can be very annoying. Currently, many people that upgrade their TV service from analog to digital TV are experiencing this. We briefly describe causes of these (relative) delays. To support this with practical evidence, we report field measurements of relative delays from 19 different receivers that show that up to 5 seconds occurs between technologies like IPTV, analogue cable, digital cable (both SD and HD), digital satellite, terrestrial and web TV. We present a controlled experiment that simulates the football watching experience with 18 participants watching clips in different rooms cheering over an audio connection. The results show that delays measured in practice disturb the experience significantly. Moreover it often took participants little time to find out if they were ahead or behind. Also many participants felt inclined to change their service to a provider with less delay. The results emphasize that delay is a quality factor that needs to be taken into account and minimized in digital TV. This is crucial for digital TV providers to entice consumers that want to be the ones to first cheer for a goal.