The demand for streaming services has been growing rapidly over the last few years, but with that comes heightened consumer expectations of receiving high-quality, uninterrupted experiences across a multitude of devices. As streaming companies scale to meet these demands, many face challenges with safeguarding and maintaining the quality of their services. This blog post discusses why quality assurance for video streaming services can be uniquely challenging, offering advice on how to handle the issues of frequent multi-platform releases, complex technology architectures, and the almost certain necessity to manage multiple third-party integrations.

‍

Balancing quality and innovation with competitive edge

‍

The challenge: In an industry where innovation is fast-paced and competition is fierce, QA becomes a delicate balancing act. The pressure to frequently release updates, maintain cross-platform feature parity, and manage a complex network of third-party integrations often forces streaming companies to make tough choices. Limited testing windows, budget constraints, and resource limitations can lead to compromises in quality—potentially jeopardizing user satisfaction and retention. Moreover, as user expectations continue to grow, the standard for what is considered "acceptable" quality rises. Customers have become accustomed to 4K streaming, instantaneous loading, and zero interruptions. Failure to meet these expectations can be the difference between survival and failure in a densely populated market.

The solution: To uphold quality while managing the demands of a fast-paced release cycle, QA teams should adopt a multi-layered approach that combines strategic automation, user-centric testing, and performance monitoring. Automated testing can handle high-frequency tests across platforms, while manual testing should focus on critical user flows and unique, platform-specific interactions to ensure a seamless experience. Additionally, incorporating real-time monitoring systems helps track performance metrics like load times and buffering, providing immediate insights into any disruptions that may impact user satisfaction. Feedback loops with users can be incredibly valuable as well. By actively collecting and analyzing user feedback — particularly after new releases—QA teams can prioritize improvements based on real user experiences and issues that may not be easily replicated in testing environments. With this mix of automation, monitoring, and user feedback, streaming companies can stay agile, maintain quality, and proactively address issues to meet the evolving expectations of their users.

‍

Keeping up with frequent multi-platform releases

‍

The challenge: One of the primary challenges in ensuring service quality is to achieve stable performance across all available applications. Naturally, each platform comes with its own operating systems, device-specific requirements, and unique user interfaces, requiring QA teams to develop platform-specific test cases to validate every update — a task that can be both time-intensive and resource-heavy. Moreover, the frequent releases often coincide with tight development schedules, reducing the time QA engineers have for testing. As a result, some companies resort to quick, superficial testing or prioritize testing only the most popular devices, which can lead to bugs slipping through and degrading the user experience on less-common platforms. In a world where buffering, resolution issues, and crashes directly affect user satisfaction, even minor issues can have a significant impact on your service’s bottom line.

Our recommendation: Implement a combination of automated testing and ‘fresh eye testing’ to efficiently cover multiple platforms without sacrificing quality. Automated tests can quickly handle repetitive and essential test cases across devices and operating systems, allowing QA teams to focus on more complex scenarios and potential edge cases. Integrating automation tools that simulate a wide array of devices and platforms also allows for quicker, consistent testing with every update. At the same time, ‘fresh eye testing’, where specialist QA teams across the globe leverage device labs to enable a combination of physical and remote testing, should be relied on for more complex scenarios. This can help fill in the gaps by engaging real users across a variety of less-common devices, which can help ensure a seamless experience on platforms that may otherwise be deprioritized. By scheduling these tests as part of the development pipeline — ideally with a CI/CD framework — QA can catch platform-specific issues earlier, preventing last-minute surprises and ensuring a more consistent experience across all devices.

‍

Managing third-party integrations: dependencies outside your control

‍

The challenge: Most if not all video streaming services depend on multiple third-party integrations in their tech stack. These external dependencies are often essential, but they also present significant QA challenges since they tend to lie outside the service’s direct control, making it difficult to ensure their stability and performance. For instance, if a CDN experiences an outage or latency, video quality can degrade or, in some cases, content may be completely inaccessible to users. QA teams need to anticipate and manage the potential risks associated with third-party technologies, creating complex test cases to simulate real-world scenarios where these dependencies may falter - a process that requires considerable resources and forethought. 

Our recommendation: API automation is a powerful strategy for managing third-party integrations, ensuring their functionality, reliability, and performance across all affected devices. This involves using tools and scripts to test, monitor, and manage APIs automatically, reducing manual effort and minimizing errors across the service’s ecosystem. This can be done in combination with leveraging real-time monitoring tools to continuously track the performance and stability of third-party services. With this approach, QA teams and operations can quickly detect and respond to anomalies, ideally even before they impact users. Additionally, it is generally wise to prepare for potential third-party failures by developing contingency plans, which can be activated when latency or outages are detected. QA teams can simulate third-party failures in a controlled test environment to ensure these fallback mechanisms work seamlessly. By relying on this combination of strategic automations, proactive monitoring and fallback mechanisms, streaming services can minimize user disruptions and maintain a high-quality experience even when external dependencies encounter issues.

‍

Ensuring service quality and stability in a fast-evolving OTT market

‍

Quality assurance for video streaming services is uniquely challenging due to the interplay of frequent multi-platform releases, complex technical architecture, and dependencies on third-party services. QA teams are tasked with ensuring that every update performs seamlessly across a variety of devices, a goal that is difficult to achieve when dealing with tight release cycles, interconnected microservices, and external dependencies. To succeed, video companies must adopt a flexible, adaptive QA strategy that emphasizes cross-platform testing, robust monitoring, and proactive issue resolution.

Accedo offers flexible QA and QoS monitoring services, ranging from augmented team models to a fully outsourced managed service offering. Whether you are looking to safeguard the quality of your service across platforms, or are looking to test the implementation of new features, our expert teams will leverage their 20+ years of combined experience to help you do this fast, cost-efficiently and always with the end user experience in mind.

Contact us here to learn more.