Are Quality and Sustainability Reconcilable? A Subjective Study on Video QoE, Luminance and Resolution

The increasing use of ICT has raised concerns about its negative impact on energy consumption and CO2 emissions. To address this issue, there is a need to better understand the trade-off between Quality of Experience (QoE) and sustainable video streaming services. In this study, we designed and conducted a subjective assessment to investigate the impact of video resolution, different types of luminance, and different end devices on the QoE and energy consumption of video streaming services. Then, we applied statistical models (Analysis of Variance and t-test) to subjective data to find out what factors influence the QoE the most and consume more energy. The obtained results suggest that under specific conditions (e.g., dark or bright ambient, low device backlight luminance, small-screen device) the users could be encouraged towards a trade-off between acceptable QoE and sustainable (green) choices because spending more energy (e.g., streaming higher-quality video) would not provide noticeable QoE enhancement.