Despite all the efforts devoted to improving the QoS of networked multimedia services, the baseline for such improvements has yet to be defined. In other words, although it is well recognized that better network conditions generally yield better service quality, the exact minimum level of network QoS required to ensure satisfactory user experience remains an open question.

In this paper, we propose a general, cheat-proof framework that enables researchers to systematically quantify the minimum QoS needs for real-time networked multimedia services. Our framework has two major features: 1) it measures the quality of a service that users find intolerable by intuitive responses and therefore reduces the burden on experiment participants; and 2) it is cheat-proof because it supports systematic verification of the participants' inputs. Via a pilot study involving 38 participants, we verify the efficacy of our framework by proving that even inexperienced participants can easily produce consistent judgments. In addition, by cross-application and cross-service comparative analysis, we demonstrate the usefulness of the derived QoS thresholds. Such knowledge will serve important reference in the evaluation of competitive applications, application recommendation, network planning, and resource arbitration.