Streaming AV on your mobile device when you're on the go--really?

If you have some kind of pay TV, Netflix, or whatever, you know the spiel. They usually offer some sort of app you can download on your smartphone with which you can supposedly watch TV when you’re away from home. My carrier’s networks aren’t that great, but when I have problems streaming just radio–never mind TV–the problem seems to be with the stations rather than my device. Certain stations (using TuneIn) play fine, and others stream fine at first but then stutter and buffer continually. Upgrading to a much more powerful device hasn’t helped–the same stations have the same issues. And though I happen to like TuneIn, it’s the same with iHeartRadio and the stations’ own apps. Using my wifi network at home, things work slightly better, but not by much. The weak stations take a lot longer to load up initially, and fail to play reliably, just as they do on the carrier networks. Of course, you can often find wifi networks in public places, but IME those are rarely if ever good enough for such data-intensive demands.

Are there actually places where the mobile networks are good enough to let you watch TV on your phone? I mean what with my being in a huge city and finding that just streaming radio can be hard enough?

Personally I’ve never tried it through cellular, but they have all worked fine for me over private or public wifi.

Are you talking about live radio and live tv, streaming to your phone through an app, like watching the ten o’clock news or something? I’ve never tried that.

I have Netflix and Rhapsody, and YouTube of course, and stream them on my phone using AT&T’s 4G LTE network. But I don’t consider those either TV or radio. I have an unlimited plan (that’s not really unlimited any more, they throttle me after 5gigs of data during any given monthly period), I never use wifi, and those services work flawlessly for me.

But those services/apps really are made to carry their data to a mobile device, I wonder if the apps you’re using are some sort of patch that ends up working - patchily - when trying to stream to a phone rather than a PC, as I find that things that are “live” like newscasts stream a little weirdly on my PC. Just not the same experience as plain old broadcast over the air.