I just added Netflix streaming to our Dish service. It seems to work fine at five AM but not in the evening when we usually watch TV. It plays for ten minutes or so then stops and says we need to watch something else or come back later. So I did, a couple of nights in a row, with the same result.
Is this it? Do people actually watch this stuff in pieces?
I’ve never had Netflix or Amazon streaming do this to me. I watch one or the other most evenings.
We used to have slow streaming sometimes, but it made a huge difference for our family when we upgraded our internet plan.
It works fine over a fast cable internet connection. Your satellite internet connection may not be fast enough or have delays that prevent a continuous stream.
Netflix typically works great, even when nothing else worked well on my Visio Smart TVs Netflix did. The probably is probably the Dish.
How do you get your Internet and what speed is it at?
Google has an internet speed test:
https://www.google.com/search?q=internet+speed+test
What speeds are you running at?
Dish may be the problem. I use Hughes for internet and Dish for TV. Don’t know what speed they run at.
In case you literally tried this last night (Jan 20), Netflix was down for me all night (my other streams like Hulu and Prime worked fine). But otherwise, it works fine for me and I rarely have problems. So you may have caught a bad night if your internet connection is up to snuff usually.
Yep, last night. I’ll give it a couple of more tries before I stop the service.
Last night a very large part of the country was streaming the inauguration festivities at once and may have maxed out your internet bandwidth. Try again tonight.
I’m not sure it would be a viable business if watching shows in pieces were the case, and you’d probably hear about it, too. It sounds like you have a slow internet connection, or something, as has been mentioned, has been temporarily hogging up the bandwidth. We’ve had Netflix for nigh on at least seven years now. I do not recall any buffering or unavailability issues.
Thanks guys! We’ll give it another try.
I have had this happen at times - and I am always able to watch something else. In my case at least, it must be a temporary problem with that particular program* rather than Netflix or my internet service.
Is there possibly some sort of licensing issue where only a certain number of streams are allowed at a time?
I got that alert the other night: “This media cannot be watched now. Please try again later.”
So I thought “Well, I’ll quit Netflix, and unplug the router for a while, maybe wait an hour.” Then I thought “Screw all that”, and just clicked on the show I wanted again.
Started right up.
I think the Netflix app has a built-in speed test.
https://fast.com/ is also provided by Netflix to test the speed of your connection to their servers.
I never had issues until recently. Sporadically I’ve been having issues. Sometimes it is just fine (even during prime time) and other time nothing plays. IIRC the last time I had issues Netflix reported a speed of .005MBPS or something ridiculous. (I have fiber to the home, and even though my Roku connects wirelessly Roku reports my wireless connection “excellent” .
Brian
fast.com reported 21 Mbps on my iPad which is nearer my router than my Roku. Will try near the Roku later. My computer is using a cat5 cable to the router and reported > 100 Mbps.
Brian
I tried Netflix this afternoon about 2. Same result. Ran the test program and connection #1 got a green check mark. The baud rate is whatever Dish provides Netflix.
I subscribed to the highest level they offered. Will try again tomorrow.
If Hughes means you’re using HughesNet for internet over satellite, I think that’s probably your problem. You might have already exceeded your monthly data cap, so HughesNet is throttling you to 1-3Mbps, and 1.5Mbps (I think) is the bare minimum for the lowest bitrate Netflix stream. That’s not good. If it’s working at 5am, that might be because HughesNet sets 2am-8am as the Bonus Zone where all data plans get an additional 50GB of data use in those off-peak hours so you aren’t being throttled between 2am and 8am yet.
I would guess that the video quality setting in the Netflix app is set to automatic, but you might want to check and see if you can set it to the lowest quality setting.
Whatever the problem is though, Netlifx plus satellite internet isn’t a great combo. Even streaming one one hour long episode per day at the lowest quality setting is going to eat up a big chunk of your monthly data plan.