FWIW: I haven't seen any evidence of preloading of anything on my DirecTV receivers.
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken Hohhof" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 10:33:27 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Direct TV on demand bandwidth What’s interesting is that when the Direct TV receiver was first installed, it seemed to download a whole bunch of stuff from the Internet, but I don’t see evidence that it is using the Internet connection now except when they watch On Demand. So if it is preloading the first 10 minutes or so of popular movies to the DVR, it must be doing it via a satellite channel. It is annoying that it will play the preloaded part, then stop and complain about the customer’s Internet being too slow. To the customer, it’s like their Internet was OK for 10 minutes and then quit working or got throttled. From: Jaime Solorza Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 9:45 AM To: Animal Farm Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Direct TV on demand bandwidth we have 15mbps feed from TWC and no issues with Demand or NetFlix...4 smartphones, three laptops, 2 PC's and three Smart TV's..UniFi AP N ..we used to when it was first installed...no fiber in our area yet...all copper. Jaime Solorza Wireless Systems Architect 915-861-1390 On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 10:50 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.
