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.
Yes, unfortunately that is the case. None of them implement it at all properly, so it reduces overall performance if you enable it except in very specific circumstances. The biggest problem though is that it only works on your end of the link. Typically the problem you want to solve isn't prioritizing the data you are sending (which is all the router's QoS can do) but the data you're receiving. There is limited control exercised by holding back ACKs or reducing TCP window size on the connections you want at a lower priority, but it is mostly pointless without cooperation from the other end.
Does anyone know what Directv's streaming architecture is like? Is everything streamed from their LA office or do they have a distributed system using Akamai or similar? If no one knows for sure, we could find out via people who live in various places around the country streaming something from them and checking the NAT table on their router to see where the endpoint of the connection is.
If everything goes through LA, then people on the east coast are always going to have more problems than people who live closer to LA - unless they have a mirror datacenter out east, in which case the people who live in the central US are most likely to have problems. The further you are from the server you're streaming from, the more chance there is of a problem along the path. Latency doesn't matter for streaming, but larger latency does magnify the effect of any dropped packets.
If everyone is having problems all at the same time no matter where they are located, for instance if a bunch of people all report problems streaming from Directv at 11 PM EDT this Friday, then we can conclude it is a problem on Directv's end, which they can fix by adding more servers and/or more bandwidth to the outside.
When you read about Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft continually building big datacenters in various places around the country and around the world, a lot of it is for this reason - get their content closer to the customer. Directv can't afford to do something like that, so they'd likely use a content delivery network like Akamai or Level3.
From my vantage point I can see many 10G ports spread around the country and they also colocate equipment in our datacenters.
I know that they have similar setups with other Teir 1 providers.
I've had a chance to try OnDemand while staying with a friend and found some different results.
The ISP service is 50 Mb/s, yet Cinemax has been very troublesome.
Watch Now keeps running out of buffer and going to the download [1080 verses the 720p] has taken much longer. With U-Verse it would "only" take twice as long [1 hour show took 2 hours], but with this cable service it's taking closer to 3 hours.
With all this bandwidth, and more than one DVR, I started downloading two at the same time.
To my surprise, the other DVR is downloading much faster.
Both are on the same coax network with a CCK hardwired to the router.
The HR24 only has 9 mins of recording after 26 mins, while the HR21 has 41 mins after 36 mins.
If you've got the bandwidth and more than one DVR, you might want to check to see if your slow OnDemand is the same.
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