Overview
IEC 63478-2:2025 - "User’s quality of experience on multimedia conferencing services - Part 2: Requirements" defines the requirements for measuring users’ Quality of Experience (QoE) in multimedia conferencing. It provides a standardized framework to assess how well conferencing services meet user expectations across audio, video, synchronization, accessibility, interoperability, participation and UI/UX dimensions. The standard specifies the parameters, functional operations and entities required to perform QoE measurement and evaluation for conferencing platforms.
Key topics and technical requirements
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QoE parameters and factors
The standard identifies a set of QoE parameters (e.g., video quality, audio quality, synchronization, accessibility, interoperability, participation, openness, UI/UX) and associated QoE factors to be measured. Parameters can be measured by subjective (user feedback) and/or objective (quantitative) methods. Examples of factors include visual clarity, latency, audio clarity/noise, captioning/transcription and cross-platform compatibility.
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Functional operations for QoE measurement
IEC 63478-2 requires three core operations:
- QoE initialization - negotiation of measurement parameters and methods among QoE entities when a service session begins.
- QoE monitoring - runtime measurement and aggregation of selected QoE parameters.
- QoE evaluation - analysis of aggregated measurements and reporting of results to conferencing servers or managers.
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Functional entities
The document defines roles and responsibilities for entities used in measurement workflows:
- MCS (Multimedia Conferencing Server)
- MCC (Multimedia Conferencing Client)
- QMA (QoE Measurement Agent)
- QMM (QoE Measurement Manager)
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Measurement profile and negotiation
The standard emphasizes negotiating which parameters and measurement approaches (subjective/objective) are used between entities to ensure consistent QoE data collection.
Applications and who will use this standard
- Service providers and platform operators - to benchmark conferencing QoE, detect degradations (latency, jitter, audio/video quality) and guide capacity planning or feature improvements.
- Product and application developers (MCC/MCS vendors) - to design APIs/SDKs, integrate QoE measurement agents and ensure interoperability and accessibility.
- Network operators and SRE/QA teams - to correlate network QoS with user QoE and validate service-level objectives.
- Accessibility and compliance teams - to measure support for assistive technologies, captioning and transcription.
- Procurement and standardization bodies - to specify QoE requirements for vendor evaluation and benchmarking.
Related standards
- IEC 63478-1: General considerations for measuring QoE on multimedia conferencing (Technical Report).
- IEC 63478-3: Measurement methods for QoE parameters (defines concrete measurement techniques).
Keywords: IEC 63478-2, QoE, multimedia conferencing, quality of experience, QoE measurement, MCC, MCS, QMA, QMM, video quality, audio quality, synchronization, accessibility, interoperability, UI/UX.