n the last years, Quality of Experience (QoE) has become a key subject of study in the research community as deemed central towards the design of novel successful applications. Also network and services providers recognize its importance in the deployment of new services, management of the current ones and planning of future networks since they have all the evidence that the perceived quality in the eyes of the user is what determines service value at the end of the day. Notwithstanding the manifest importance of QoE, if we look at how the current networks and services are managed we see that the current practices are still mostly focused on the concept of Quality of Service (QoS) and resource overprovisioning, whereas little space is reserved to the analysis of the real impact of any choice on end-user perceived quality. The reason is that from theory to practice the path is full of challenges. 
Firstly, there is the need to move from purely traffic-based measurement to user-oriented quality evaluation, which requires for including quality influencing features that are still typically neglected, such as context and human factors. Secondly, current user quality models are based on many assumption that do not characterize real scenarios of network and application management. Thirdly, network architectures and relevant service management procedures need to be designed so that the quality models for the different services can be plug-and-played in a flexible way in order to accommodate the highly dynamic proliferation of an increasing diversity of services. This should hopefully leverage on the ongoing softwarization process that keeps revolutionizing our network infrastructures. 
Additionally, we witness the trend of migrating end-to-end multimedia communication systems/platforms to the cloud. Media processing and consumption in the cloud requires attention from two main perspectives: maintenance of processing-related cloud operations over the execution time considering the end-user and application-related QoS/QoE requirements via dynamic resource provisioning; and the parallelization and abstraction of media processing tasks for the optimization of limited and shared cloud resources. Furthermore, the domains of Smart Cities and the Internet-of-Things offer new opportunities and use cases, but at the same time pose new challenges for keeping users engaged and interested in related emerging applications and services. This also includes other aspects such as quality of life as well as critical considerations such as user safety, particularly when it comes to urban transport and emergency scenarios.