Here is today’s puzzler:
I have Youtube TV running on my laptop, and I am watching on a TV screen attached by an HDMI cable.
When I watch Law and Order, it keeps ‘buffering’, i.e. the show stops for a few seconds while it refreshes. However, if I switch to the football game, it streams continuously without stopping.
Could one Youtube TV channel come in better than another?
Lord, yes! Nobody really knows the reason, and if they do they will gurgitate a load of jargon you won’t understand, then tell you to unplug everything and restart it, and nothing will change - nothing!
We live in an age of great promise and massive disappointment. I suggest you forget about it, and go outside and work on your car.
I assume that Law & Order is taped, either an older rerun or or being simulcast with a new episode on OTA TV. Either way, if you are just a bit below the bandwidth required for the show, Youtube may buffer periodically in order to get you the full content of the show even if it’s not delivered in a completely timely manner.
Is the football game that you’re watching live? That is, are you watching it while it’s being played? If that is the case, Youtube may be dropping frames or sections of data periodically to keep up with things in real time.
So it could be less a case of one channel coming in better than another, and more a case of two channels, both slightly suboptimal for your display/bandwidth, doing things slightly differently so as to most closely meet your expectations for each type of programming.
I don’t use YouTube TV but get the impression that it bundles streams from various sources and I could understand that a channel showing a live football game has a better quality stream (i.e., more expensive, higher bandwidth, less lag) than one showing decades old reruns.
That makes sense. Thanks.
But I drive a Toyota! It never needs work.
I don’t much about the technical aspects of streaming technology but this could also be due to some sort of load balancing on the servers. You are the only one watching your show, but anybody watching that football game is all watching it at the same time. So they probably prioritize the live content.
I’ve had YouTubeTV for 2 years and we have the opposite problem. Our local news station always has a buffering issue while the pre-recorded content rarely if ever does. It only lasts a few seconds, and it’s usually at the same time of the broadcast every time. I tried complaining to YouTube about it and they gave me a discount on my monthly charge. That’s it. No fix, no explanation. I’ve learned to accept it since it’s better than paying a lot of money for channels I will never watch.
This happens on plain YouTube, too. They have servers storing the content spread out geographically. Popular content is going to be replicated everywhere there’s an audience (or, for streaming, it’ll be broadcast to local nodes and then sent from there to the clients). But ancient content with only a few viewers is just going to stay where it is; it isn’t worth replicating. So you may be pulling it from across the country from some old-ass server that should be retired. YouTube always has some degree of replication so as not to lose content when a server goes down, but you still might be stuck pulling from a slow node.
Internet traffic is sent as packets of data from the server to the client machine. Depending on the location of each, the packets may pass through quite a number of intermediate nodes on the way to your TV, which is slower, more error prone, and adds to overall network traffic. Large media providers such as YouTube and Netflix employ CDNs (content delivery networks) where popular content is replicated and cached locally. This significantly reduces network traffic as packets typically need only travel the short trip from CDN server to clients. As @Dr.Strangelove suggests, it is only content that is in demand that will get the full CDN treatment, less popular content may still have to make the full-length trip from a YouTube datacenter.
Thanks all for the enlightening responses. It seems, in a way, that we haven’t come all that far from having to get up and jiggle the rabbit ears.