I miss the days when my much slower internet connection let me download entire videos faster than streaming to watch them with less buffering and fewer glitches. Now that I have a rock solid gigabit fiber connection with single digit latency, how is watching video such a bad experience?
Network engineer here. There’s a lot of reasons your network might not work well. None malicious.
You’re watching it in high def on a slow connection. Try going back to the "good old days"of 360p and see if it’s fast.
Your network may be bottlenecked somewhere. Try using speedtest (search for it) and see if you’re getting slow connection quality.
You may be getting packet loss. Using the ping command, try running it indefinitely for a little while (windows key+r, cmd, “ping 8.8.8.8 -t”) see if there are blips of failures.
Remember! Never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. Your isp, Google, and yes, even Microsoft, don’t want you to have a bad experience using your computer. Lots of people with 0 networking knowledge but a bone to pick with the system will give you unhelpful advice.
Oh no, I attribute it all to cheap/lazy streaming providers and excessive tracking/ads. I’ve always had well above the bandwidth required and speed tests bear that out
However if the streamer is overloaded or being careful not to send bits faster than it deems necessary, it doesn’t matter how good my network is.
Tracking is actually incredibly tiny bandwidth-wise. Like, fractions of a fraction of your bandwidth. Adserv is also very tiny due to modern edge server infrastructure. Ads are static content. It’s already cached and likely within the same city as you. That’s part of why ads tend to play perfectly and fast while the content can be slow. On the other hand, that obscure 200 sub guy ranting about why the square-headed screws inability to catch on is a giant American conspiracy to keep Canada from commercial dominance is almost certainly not locally cached. It has to come from Google’s video content servers way out in silicon valley.
I’m sure the practice of net neutrality helped back then. Sure net neutrality is the rule again, but that doesn’t mean everyone instantly started following the rule.
Years ago I had the free version of Hulu that came with ads (it used to have the free ad tier, and the paid-for-no-ads tier). Hulu did the dynamically scaling resolution to match your connection thing, which was mostly good for me since I didn’t have great internet and I’ll take smooth playing 720p over constant buffering. I don’t know if the ads scaled or were naturally at a reasonably low resolution, but I never had a problem with them playing through
One day though, something changed. Suddenly ads were coming in only in the highest resolution supported by Hulu at the time. Thanks to my terribly slow internet, this meant horrible buffering. Combined with ads being louder than programs, a 30 second ad turned into a multi-minute experience of a few frames at a time screeching at me before buffering again.
I miss the days when my much slower internet connection let me download entire videos faster than streaming to watch them with less buffering and fewer glitches. Now that I have a rock solid gigabit fiber connection with single digit latency, how is watching video such a bad experience?
Network engineer here. There’s a lot of reasons your network might not work well. None malicious.
You’re watching it in high def on a slow connection. Try going back to the "good old days"of 360p and see if it’s fast.
Your network may be bottlenecked somewhere. Try using speedtest (search for it) and see if you’re getting slow connection quality.
You may be getting packet loss. Using the ping command, try running it indefinitely for a little while (windows key+r, cmd, “ping 8.8.8.8 -t”) see if there are blips of failures.
Remember! Never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. Your isp, Google, and yes, even Microsoft, don’t want you to have a bad experience using your computer. Lots of people with 0 networking knowledge but a bone to pick with the system will give you unhelpful advice.
Oh no, I attribute it all to cheap/lazy streaming providers and excessive tracking/ads. I’ve always had well above the bandwidth required and speed tests bear that out
However if the streamer is overloaded or being careful not to send bits faster than it deems necessary, it doesn’t matter how good my network is.
Tracking is actually incredibly tiny bandwidth-wise. Like, fractions of a fraction of your bandwidth. Adserv is also very tiny due to modern edge server infrastructure. Ads are static content. It’s already cached and likely within the same city as you. That’s part of why ads tend to play perfectly and fast while the content can be slow. On the other hand, that obscure 200 sub guy ranting about why the square-headed screws inability to catch on is a giant American conspiracy to keep Canada from commercial dominance is almost certainly not locally cached. It has to come from Google’s video content servers way out in silicon valley.
I’m sure the practice of net neutrality helped back then. Sure net neutrality is the rule again, but that doesn’t mean everyone instantly started following the rule.
No matter how fast your connection is, a 30s ad takes half a minute to play.
The frustrating thing is that when I do see ads, the ad itself plays in higher resolution, and plays more smoothly than the video I’m trying to watch.
Years ago I had the free version of Hulu that came with ads (it used to have the free ad tier, and the paid-for-no-ads tier). Hulu did the dynamically scaling resolution to match your connection thing, which was mostly good for me since I didn’t have great internet and I’ll take smooth playing 720p over constant buffering. I don’t know if the ads scaled or were naturally at a reasonably low resolution, but I never had a problem with them playing through
One day though, something changed. Suddenly ads were coming in only in the highest resolution supported by Hulu at the time. Thanks to my terribly slow internet, this meant horrible buffering. Combined with ads being louder than programs, a 30 second ad turned into a multi-minute experience of a few frames at a time screeching at me before buffering again.
I didn’t keep Hulu long after that.
Different CDN with better allocation of resource and location than the CDN for the content you’re watching.
Makes sense, the ad people are the real customers vs your attention the product.