Forum: HoseHeads Sprint Car General Forum (go)
Moderators: dirtonly  /  dmantx  /  hosehead

can someone that had video last night speak to how it was,thanks

This is what I can offer.

The feed was constant.  Meaning we never even once buffered.  But I thought the picture quality was horrible.  Very blurred here and there.  Just my 2 cents.

Just posted in another thread - it was rough early on during hotlaps and qualifying, but they were able to work the issues out and I had no problem during racing action. 

The picture was OK - the player indicated it was streaming at 608p, which would be roughly halfway between standard def and 720p HD. The larger the screen, the worse it will look though.

Absolutely no problems here in Arizona for me. I paused it during qualifying for about 5 minutes and stayed 5 minutes behind the rest of the evening. Picture was great and not once did it buffer off a 24 foot HDMI cable from computer to television. 

Just as some insight, there are a few things about the streaming world that may help you understand video quality.

The easiest thing, from a customer service perspective, is to put out a stream that is better than standard def but not quite 720p high def.  The reason for this is that a vast majority of fan's internet can handle this quality of stream, thus eliminating most of the customer service complaints about buffering (the video stopping and starting).  If a company pushes out an HD stream and uses an adaptive player (a player that chooses the best quality of stream for your internet service), like the ones on Facebook or YouTube, fans will inevitably force the HD quality even if the player determines that a lower resolution is a better choice.  When their internet cannot handle the HD quality and the video buffers they instantly blame the broadcast company, when in fact buffering is caused by the internet service on the customer side and the video being forced HD.  If it's left on adaptive and it drops quality from HD to standard def when family/friends stress the internet connection, they again blame the broadcast company for the video quality suffering.

People often forget that they may have high-speed internet but they also have a lot of people/things tapped into their wifi.  Family members doing their thing, the Nest/security program for your house, the iPad lying on the nightstand doing it's nightly backup and the 10 friends you invited over to watch are all logged into your wifi and using bandwidth while you're trying to watch racing, so even though you have 25Mbps down it doesn't take long before your router starts prioritizing traffic and your video may start to buffer.  First thing most do at that point is get on social media and start complaining about the stream.  Again, 90% of the time buffering is caused by the internet service on the customer side.

We had a customer contact us with the complaint that, and I'm paraphrasing here, "While my friends were over, your stream didn't work for sh** but as soon as they left it's working fine!  I want my money back!"  Turns out his wifi wasn't password protected and all 15ish of his friends who were over to watch instantly autoconnected to the wifi in his shop.  He did later apologize but for a while we were the worst things to happen to online streaming in this century, or at least that's what he was blasting out on social media.