I have not used DirectTV on demand for some time but when I was using it, I would queue up a bunch of movies. It would start loading them with different colored progress bars. If the bar turned green, you could start watching without any more buffering. Normally I would go watch other stuff and view the downloaded stuff later or the next day. I was using a regular 5.8 FSK SM for that and I was very happy with it.
From: Ty Featherling Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 7:23 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Direct TV on demand bandwidth Good info! I have been wondering how their streaming stuff works so poorly. We often get calls about it and DirecTV told them that their internet is too slow. I always point out that Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and others stream in HD no problem on their service and maybe, just maybe DirecTV is the problem. Thanks for sharing. I am forwarding this to my techs. -Ty On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 11:50 PM, Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote: 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.
