According to the report, U.S. operators are spending an estimated $5.3 billion a year to handle calls, manage outages, and provide in-home maintenance services. Similarly, European operators are spending an estimated €3.7 billion. Almost one-third of these annual expenses are being spent to address multiscreen service delivery failures directly. This report indicates that the velocity of feature updates, unmanaged devices, and spikes in system loads are creating multiple fail points, with the potential to swamp support. It also indicates that many issues could be prevented through more rigorous and continuous testing throughout the service delivery lifecycle.
In separate but related research, S3 Group also investigated video service delivery issues from the consumer perspective. In June, a survey was conducted of 452 U.S. consumers who pay for streaming video services from pay TV and OTT providers. When asked if they had experienced service delivery problems in the past 30 days:
- 20% of subscribers said that a program they selected to watch failed to play.
- Subscribers also showed little tolerance for faults before changing the "channel"; 34% said they switched to another TV or video service when their service failed to start.
- 33% experienced picture quality problems such as pixelation, low resolution, or buffering on their streaming service.