A few people have written here recently suggesting that streaming is now almost as good for most practical purposes as downloading, and there isn't the wait needed for downloading. Though at least one has commented that in some parts of the European continent downloading works, while streaming doesn't - even for audio/music.
We have a BT Infinity connection, and a YouView box, and mostly we have been pleased with this. We sometimes watch catchup TV using the iPlayer channel, and mostly it seems good enough. We also have watched some live streaming channels Eurosport or BT Sport - for example to watch tennis from the US Open, which is mostly OK. This indicates that generally/usually the connection has sufficient bandwidth to give acceptable resuls.
Tonight we tried to watch the episode of Beck - The Eye of the Storm - but after a while it became almost unwatchable, stopping every few seconds. Unfortunately by then we'd got into it a bit, so we wanted to stick with it. I did try downloading the whole thing on to my iPad Pro, but it was obvious that by the time it would have downloaded we would almost have got to the end. This almost turned out to be true. In fact the whole thing was downloaded while we had about 10 minutes left to watch on the video stream, which was still very poor. At that point I plugged in our Apple TV, and used Airplay to send the downloaded video to our TV, which was very satisfactory.
I don't know why the BT Youview box was so poor tonight - normally streaming BBC on demand channels through that box has hadly any problems, but tonight it was dreadful. I wonder if we will have to resort to downloading all the on demand material we might want to watch from now on, in order to avoid this happening again. Obviously we'll have to download ahead of the game, but if we know that we're going to have to do that, then that won't be too bad.
This is one of the few times I have found having an Apple TV has been helpful - as often I find it just doesn't provide what's needed, or doesn't work without hiccups.
Have others noticed such a rapid deterioration in BT's iPlayer service? Maybe it's a one off glitch, which will go away.
We have a BT Infinity connection, and a YouView box, and mostly we have been pleased with this. We sometimes watch catchup TV using the iPlayer channel, and mostly it seems good enough. We also have watched some live streaming channels Eurosport or BT Sport - for example to watch tennis from the US Open, which is mostly OK. This indicates that generally/usually the connection has sufficient bandwidth to give acceptable resuls.
Tonight we tried to watch the episode of Beck - The Eye of the Storm - but after a while it became almost unwatchable, stopping every few seconds. Unfortunately by then we'd got into it a bit, so we wanted to stick with it. I did try downloading the whole thing on to my iPad Pro, but it was obvious that by the time it would have downloaded we would almost have got to the end. This almost turned out to be true. In fact the whole thing was downloaded while we had about 10 minutes left to watch on the video stream, which was still very poor. At that point I plugged in our Apple TV, and used Airplay to send the downloaded video to our TV, which was very satisfactory.
I don't know why the BT Youview box was so poor tonight - normally streaming BBC on demand channels through that box has hadly any problems, but tonight it was dreadful. I wonder if we will have to resort to downloading all the on demand material we might want to watch from now on, in order to avoid this happening again. Obviously we'll have to download ahead of the game, but if we know that we're going to have to do that, then that won't be too bad.
This is one of the few times I have found having an Apple TV has been helpful - as often I find it just doesn't provide what's needed, or doesn't work without hiccups.
Have others noticed such a rapid deterioration in BT's iPlayer service? Maybe it's a one off glitch, which will go away.
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