OK, let me re-phrase that- either the minimum speed of the link etc...

It might also be cached elsewhere, such as on a CDN, although, based on my limited research, this site is not on a CDN.

Edited by camieabz (Wed 30-Jan-13 21:44:51)

In reply to a post by timfoster:

Ah me too now. I think it's because of the program being shown. Usually it's fine.

Ah! Now it's streaming fine for me at about 2 to 3.5 Mbps on a 20 Meg connection; no buffering. So the country authorization must depend on the program being transmitted.

Coming in at around 3500kbps on Sky Fibre optic.

No issues.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 31-Jan-13 01:15:00)

No problems here watching the Mexican version of loose women at 2500 kbps.

So it looks like the problem may be my end then. I'm with PlusNet and testing reports 23MB downloads which is why I thought the problem was less likely to be the connection and more likely to be something else.

The box it runs on isn't a super computer, but it is a new one and runs nothing but this (or whichever internet TV we're watching). I have similar problems, although not quite as frequently, when we're watching the subscription channel tennistv.com. This is almost exclusively live. They do have video replays of matches, but we tend to only watch the live games.

The other site we use regularly and have similar problems with is time4tv.com which shows Sky Sports and other sports channels. I accept that this site is probably the most flaky of them all though.

What I was really after was suggestions for how I can optimise the machine to run these streams without interruption. I'm running Windows 8 and play these outside of the metro interface, both in Chrome and IE.

I had thought that with fibre we would be able to watch things like this as though we were watching regular tv. Was I expecting too much?

In reply to a post by timfoster:

What I was really after was suggestions for how I can optimise the machine to run these streams without interruption.

Re:

In reply to a post by timfoster:

wireless

Nobody seems to have suggested the obvious test- how does it behave on a wired connection?

It may well be the same, but the check needs to be done- it may be a simple matter of using a different channel.

Wired isn't an option I'm afraid Bill. The PC is in the lounge and connected the TV. There simply isn't a wired connection that goes to it. I can't even move it to the router as there isn't a monitor I could plug into it.

That sounds as though it's some distance from, and not in the same room as, the router... in which case the wireless would definitely be a good suspect.

If you can't get hold of a long Ethernet cable for testing, it may be worth just trying different channels on the router to see what happens. In my (admittedly not exhaustive) experience, the usual default of Auto is seldom a good idea- even manually setting the same channel that Auto selects often improves matters

It might even be worth buying one- they're cheap enough, and imo a long Ethernet cable should be in everyone's spares box