I just ran a couple DirecTV on Demand shows. Speedtest.net puts my connection at about 35 megabit, so plenty of room for content. I did an SD 30 minute show, an HD hour show and an HD movie.
The SD started in 14 seconds and took about 6 minutes to download. It downloaded about 300 megs. It peaked at about 9 megabit/s. The HD started in about 10 seconds (forgot to count) and took maybe 7 minutes to download. I wasn't expecting it to be done already, so I wasn't watching for it. I grabbed the screen shot at 8 minutes. It downloaded 340 megs. It peaked at about 9 megabit/s. The HD movie started in 22 seconds and took 1:27 to load. It downloaded 4 gigs. It peaked about 9 megabits and had some gaps of no activity. Now given the gaps in the HD movie... maybe I didn't actually get the entire TV shows above? The movie is definitely a better quality than the TV show. I'll do some more tests later today\tomorrow\this week. I'll do a 1080P movie test (if I can find a free one), redo the TV show tests now knowing that it will have long periods of inactivity and then do them all over as straight downloads as opposed to playing it right away. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken Hohhof" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2015 11:50:46 PM Subject: [AFMUG] Direct TV on demand bandwidth Maybe everyone already knows this, but here's a graph from an experiment today with a customer watching an on-demand movie on Direct TV. Customer said he had no problems with Netflix, Hulu, etc. but could not watch Direct TV on-demand stuff on his 3 Mbps connection. Turns out it buffers up about 10 minutes of viewing time, then uses a constant 5 Mbps. Evidently there are not various bitrate streams, just 5 Mbps. I can see why the customer was having problems on their 3 Mbps plan. Another aspect of the behavior was annoying him. He reported that usually the movie would start playing immediately, play for about 10 minutes, and then stop with a message about his Internet being too slow. But in today's test, nothing happened for several minutes, until the display said it had downloaded about 10 minutes worth, then it started playing. We concluded the first behavior happens when the start of the movie has been preloaded to their DVR, probably because it's a popular movie. The second behavior, like today's test, happens when it first has to fill the buffer.
