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21-24 Mbps not enough bandwidth to stream On Demand!?!

35K views 130 replies 43 participants last post by  veryoldschool 
#1 ·
Every time I try to watch an On Demand HD movie I get a message saying my download speed isn't fast enough to stream and do I want to just download the movie for later viewing. How much bandwidth do you need to stream? I can download a movie by bit torrent in less time than it takes to download an On Demand movie. How many people even have 21 Mbps? If that ain't enough, then very few people can watch streaming On Demand.

Your thoughts, please.
 
#78 ·
cypherx said:
Actually my VOD isn't working now. It says there was a problem connecting to the Internet: fix now, continue later. Continue later just takes you back to live TV. Fix now takes you to the system test screen. In the playlist it just says pending download. After sometime it said "there was a problem connecting to DirecTV. Retry in progress (85) (ok).
Update It fixed itself late last night.

Needless to say there are strange anomolies from time to time. Generally it works though.
 
#79 ·
raott said:
Don't know the bit rates and don't really care. The picture looks good and streams instantly, that is my primary concern.
Have to agree with this. Stuff on Vudu looks very very good to my eye and streaming works w/o buffering.

There seems to be some intelligent discussion about various bitrates of the streaming services here http://www.avsforum.com/t/1414999/streaming-bitrates
 
#80 ·
mystic7 said:
Yeah, ok, fellow Yankee fan. Is it illegal for the music industry to charge me for 3 vinyl albums, a cassette, and a CD of the same albums because the technology changes or the vinyl wears out or the tape snaps or the CD glue comes unstuck?

If I've purchased an album 5 times I don't feel any guilt in downloading the songs for free in mp3 form. And I don't feel guilty about dl'ing a movie which in almost every case sucks these days, which also explains why I only do about 2 or 3 movies a year at most and sleep through most of them. And if they don't want me to even do that, then tell Blu Ray player manufacturers not to include USB ports on their players and TV's that are put there for the express purpose of being to play video from a source other than a BluRay disc..
Here in the great Midwest our library carries a huge selection of movies/music that are available for "free" (paid for by property taxes). Hypothetically, I can stick a disk in my car, it's ripped onto the HDD. Hypothetically I can then copy it (because I have paid for it through taxes) for backup in case of a HDD failure. Hypothetically, movies can be copied for later viewing, not distribution.

It's a loose interpretation of the law, but so what.
 
#81 ·
It looks like for those whom have Mediacom in the southeast, they did some updates last night during their "8pm-6:30am update" Internet was out for a while but the internet speed seems faster so hurrah.

not to shabby for 35.99 a month :D

am7crew said:
Now that is ALOT of dwnld mb/s! That is more dwnld mb/s than the call center I work out of lol
Insane!
 
#83 ·
SomeRandomIdiot said:
After your post, I plugged a HR34 into a 10Mbps cable modem backup isp connection (that does NOT exceed 10Mbps) and watched a Showtime HD OnDemand program (channel 1545) with no issues whatsoever. As thus, to answer your original question, 21-24 Mbps is plenty of bandwidth for OnDemand viewing.

Obviously, if you or a family member is running a bunch of torrents (or perhaps your neighborhood is bandwidth starved), those could be killing your speed. But regardless, that is not a problem on D*'s end.
I don't know. Is one torrent every few months considered a lot?
 
#84 ·
I'm currently working with 50ish down, and 7ish up. My connection is stable, and I'm the only Internet user in the house.

Here's what I've found -

Only certain channels will have the issue. For example I couldn't do any "Watch Now" on TMC (I tried about 10 different titles) I tried about 20 different titles on various other channels (HBO, Cinemax, Starz) and those all worked.

My "uneducated guess" is that certain channels/servers are allocated x amount of bandwidth, once that limit is reached bandwidth is throttled.
 
#85 ·
inf0z said:
I'm currently working with 50ish down, and 7ish up. My connection is stable, and I'm the only Internet user in the house.

Here's what I've found -

Only certain channels will have the issue. For example I couldn't do any "Watch Now" on TMC (I tried about 10 different titles) I tried about 20 different titles on various other channels (HBO, Cinemax, Starz) and those all worked.

My "uneducated guess" is that certain channels/servers are allocated x amount of bandwidth, once that limit is reached bandwidth is throttled.
It would make sense that they would prioritize the premium networks and throttle the other. That's what I would want when paying for the premiums, to make sure they work as expected.
 
#86 ·
COPTERDOCTOR said:
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I have the same problem at this speed. It is not your speed but the lack of speed by Directv. They are serving millions and it shows badly. They need a boost in the amount of servers they use and the speed of their connection.
I wonder what your actual connection speed is and what it is to the servers in CA. Comcast is going to show you a great score on speedtest. I believe all/most of the servers for D* OnDemand are in CA.
 
#89 ·
Something I've found about "watch now" verses downloading the movie.
On one, the watch now was 720p, while the same movie was 1080i downloaded.

As many times as I try, I never find a show downloading any slower than ~ 7Mb/s.
Recently I did have some problems downloading and along the way was able to check the different resolutions mentioned above.
The problems for watching now and downloading at very slow rates, all turned out to be on my end and with the connection to my router.

"I almost wish" I could find that there was a problem on the DirecTV side, but I just haven't seen it in maybe the past 5 years or so.
 
#90 ·
Speedtest is flawed for some people with cable ISPs because a lot of them have a system (called various marketing terms like turbo mode or power boost) that prioritizes new connections over older ones. After the initial burst the speed drops, sometimes by a huge amount. Great for downloading web pages, not so great for streaming or downloading a large file. Comcast tends to use this a lot. The speedtest.net (and most other online connection tests) are so brief they get fooled.

I'll bet if you download a big file you don't get that same 115Mb/sec. You should be able to download a large file like the below in about three and a half minutes if your connection is really that fast, unless there is some problem on the internet between you and the server. Most likely you'll see the download start out with your browser reporting 14MB/sec and then you'll see that speed drop a lot.

These servers host the content for Microsoft's online store so they can handle pretty much anything you throw at them (if you're curious, this link is for a 3.1GB Windows 7 DVD; you don't pay for the software, you pay for the license key, so you can legally download this)

http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59465.iso
 
#91 ·
slice1900 said:
Speedtest is flawed for some people with cable ISPs because a lot of them have a system (called various marketing terms like turbo mode or power boost) that prioritizes new connections over older ones. After the initial burst the speed drops, sometimes by a huge amount. Great for downloading web pages, not so great for streaming or downloading a large file. Comcast tends to use this a lot. The speedtest.net (and most other online connection tests) are so brief they get fooled.

I'll bet if you download a big file you don't get that same 115Mb/sec. You should be able to download a large file like the below in about three and a half minutes if your connection is really that fast, unless there is some problem on the internet between you and the server. Most likely you'll see the download start out with your browser reporting 14MB/sec and then you'll see that speed drop a lot.

These servers host the content for Microsoft's online store so they can handle pretty much anything you throw at them (if you're curious, this link is for a 3.1GB Windows 7 DVD; you don't pay for the software, you pay for the license key, so you can legally download this)

http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59465.iso
Nope those servers have a cap also.
 
#92 ·
inf0z said:
My "uneducated guess" is that certain channels/servers are allocated x amount of bandwidth, once that limit is reached bandwidth is throttled.
But the old server -> client model does not scale well in this case. They need to invest in a CDN that specializes in media streaming. A real content delivery network distributes and caches content at the network edge, and also distributes it efficiently. A CDN has the resources, thousands of Internet pop's and backbone connections and QoS that would far surpass what a single company could accomplish on their own.

The distributed and cached CDN would alleviate the distribution issue vs spending gobs of money on additional servers and bandwidth at DirecTV's data center.
 
#94 ·
slice1900 said:
Speedtest is flawed for some people with cable ISPs because a lot of them have a system (called various marketing terms like turbo mode or power boost) that prioritizes new connections over older ones. After the initial burst the speed drops, sometimes by a huge amount. Great for downloading web pages, not so great for streaming or downloading a large file. Comcast tends to use this a lot. The speedtest.net (and most other online connection tests) are so brief they get fooled.

I'll bet if you download a big file you don't get that same 115Mb/sec. You should be able to download a large file like the below in about three and a half minutes if your connection is really that fast, unless there is some problem on the internet between you and the server. Most likely you'll see the download start out with your browser reporting 14MB/sec and then you'll see that speed drop a lot.

These servers host the content for Microsoft's online store so they can handle pretty much anything you throw at them (if you're curious, this link is for a 3.1GB Windows 7 DVD; you don't pay for the software, you pay for the license key, so you can legally download this)

http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-59465.iso
I gave the test file you offered a try this afternoon for the fun of it and timed the download to 4 minutes and 2 seconds including the file scan by Norton. Congestion, and many other factors effect download speeds. I have found using the latest Mozilla Waterfox 64 bit browser is some faster. I did use Windows 8 64 bit and the Internet explorer 32 bit browser for the timed download. I have the Comcast 105mb down/20mb up service that I am very happy with.
My orginal point to the orginal poster was that his problem with DTV on demand downloads was widespread and happened to all levels of Internet speed service. It is clearly a capacity problem with the DTV servers. I have found that when starting a "watch now" on say HBO on demand(The Sopranos) will feed just about fast enough to watch it if you delay it just a few seconds,and I think that is the target speed by DTV that they are throttling too.
 
#95 ·
COPTERDOCTOR said:
My orginal point to the orginal poster was that his problem with DTV on demand downloads was widespread and happened to all levels of Internet speed service. It is clearly a capacity problem with the DTV servers. I have found that when starting a "watch now" on say HBO on demand(The Sopranos) will feed just about fast enough to watch it if you delay it just a few seconds,and I think that is the target speed by DTV that they are throttling too.
There really isn't anything "clearly" about this.
I haven't had one problem that wasn't found/corrected on my end.
The target speed is "just about fast enough" to watch it in real time.
If one is expecting more, then "clearly" it won't happen that often. I have seen faster than 1:1, but it wasn't that it came faster, but that the bit-rate was lower of the program.
 
#96 ·
Directvs VOD & watch now has nothing to do with "servers". It strictly depends on your Internet connection and how it is connected to the DTV system.
If you are using a wifi deca you could have all sorts of problems, seeing how that is wireless!
If you use a broadband deca you more than likely never experience the "not enough bandwidth" error. Hard wired is always the best connection choice no matter what you are doing.
 
#97 ·
acrow@directsatusa said:
Directvs VOD & watch now has nothing to do with "servers". It strictly depends on your Internet connection and how it is connected to the DTV system.
If you are using a wifi deca you could have all sorts of problems, seeing how that is wireless!
If you use a broadband deca you more than likely never experience the "not enough bandwidth" error. Hard wired is always the best connection choice no matter what you are doing.
Extremely vague...
 
#99 ·
acrow@directsatusa said:
Directvs VOD & watch now has nothing to do with "servers". It strictly depends on your Internet connection and how it is connected to the DTV system.
If you are using a wifi deca you could have all sorts of problems, seeing how that is wireless!
If you use a broadband deca you more than likely never experience the "not enough bandwidth" error. Hard wired is always the best connection choice no matter what you are doing.
While wireless can be a weak point if it isn't setup well, given the download speed from DirecTV, it's pretty hard to say that the WCCK is the limiting factor.
 
#100 ·
cypherx said:
But the old server -> client model does not scale well in this case. They need to invest in a CDN that specializes in media streaming. A real content delivery network distributes and caches content at the network edge, and also distributes it efficiently. A CDN has the resources, thousands of Internet pop's and backbone connections and QoS that would far surpass what a single company could accomplish on their own.

The distributed and cached CDN would alleviate the distribution issue vs spending gobs of money on additional servers and bandwidth at DirecTV's data center.
I agree with this 100%. Unfortunately this will require some bit of infrastructure change to their on-demand, I don't foresee DIRECTV making this type of investment any time soon. When they start pushing live streaming more, we'll probably see this change.
 
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