I often go online to catch up on network TV shows after their aired. And I’ve noticed a consistent problem.
When I’m watching the show, it runs just fine. Occasional glitches, maybe, but otherwise all right.
Then comes the commercial. It’s constantly buffering. A 30-second ad takes three or four minutes to run, five seconds at a time, then ten seconds of buffering. And, of course, you can’t skip them.
What gives? If they can get the show to run smoothly, why do they have problems with the ads – which, of course, pay their bills and should be given top priority.
I’ve noticed this on NBC and the CW. I stopped watching several shows because of the five minutes of glitchy ads throughout.
The shows and ads are being hosted on different servers. i.e., the network’s own servers as opposed to the advertiser’s adservers. Smooth playback of any video file, whether it’s the main show or an advert, will depend on how robust the host servers are, where they’re located in relation to where they’re being viewed, network speed, and the actual quality of the video file.
You’re complaining about smooth shows and choppy ads but somebody else in another part of the country could be complaining about the exact opposite. Not good for the network, the advertiser nor the consumer.
I suggest trying an adblocker to filter out ads so you can continue to enjoy your shows.
I have this problem with watching CBS All Access on my Fire TV. The show runs fine but the commercials will buffer, and sometimes even freeze; in the latter case sometimes I have to hit the “back” button and effectively start watching the show from the beginning, although I can fast-forward to where I had left off.
As an aside, if you’re using devices to watch TV (Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Roku, etc.), I’d suggest you sign up for a NextDNS (nextdns.io) free account and configure everything in your home to use it. It’s a pretty good system that allows you to choose what to block, whitelist domains that you don’t want blocked, etc. And it has a lot of methods for you to use encrypted security DNS so that your ISP and others can’t figure out what you’re doing online by watching your DNS queries.
I use a small pi-hole server at home that I point to NextDNS for a double layer of protection. Pi-hole is pretty great by itself but isn’t necessarily easy for someone without some Linux experience to set up and maintain.
While I’ve seen this a couple of times, more often than not it’s the other way around: The ads play flawlessly, then the show hangs, buffers, freezes, and sometimes gives up with some variation of “Network trouble. Please check your connection.” Refreshing the page results in the same thing happening again: Flawless ads, actual video refuses to play.
I’m not an expert but want to point out from my limited experience that it’s not just a matter of the feature servers vs the ad servers. There are many levels of intermediate servers involved in real-time analysis of your location, your OS and browser, your identity, etc. that ensure such things as whether the content is legally available to stream to you, etc. It’s really quite complicated. So there could be a slowdown at any point along the way.