Evening buffering vs daytime stability — is this normal for paid services?

STBforum · Mar 8, 2021

Starting this thread to share my experience and hear from others in the community. Happy to discuss in detail.

mark_wifi · Mar 9, 2021

My service works perfectly from 6am to 5pm. After 5pm it buffers frequently. Is this normal?

CarlaStream · Mar 10, 2021

Yes, unfortunately it's common. Evening peak hours stress CDN capacity.

BettyStream · Mar 11, 2021

Peak hours: roughly 5pm-11pm in the local time zone of most users.

rachel_r · Mar 12, 2021

A quality service should provision enough CDN capacity for peak hours. If they don't, that's a problem.

PatriciaHD · Mar 11, 2021

Have you contacted support about the pattern? They might be able to assign you to a less-loaded server.

AlexDigital · Mar 14, 2021

Some services have multiple server regions and you can switch between them.

Moderator_Max · Mar 14, 2021

I switched to the European server cluster during US peak hours and quality improved significantly.

JosephHD · Mar 11, 2021

Interesting. Does latency from European servers cause any sync issues?

EricNetPro · Mar 10, 2021

For on-demand content it doesn't matter. For live content there might be a slight delay.

DNSfixer · Mar 16, 2021

A few seconds of delay on live content is usually acceptable for sports and events.

BufferBuster · Mar 13, 2021

For live sports the delay matters more than for shows. Something to be aware of.

TVboxPro · Mar 18, 2021

I now time-shift live content anyway so a few seconds doesn't bother me.

TomBuffer · Mar 12, 2021

The better solution is a service that provisions adequately for peak demand.

CarlDigital · Mar 17, 2021

Agreed. But while you're locked in a subscription, the server-switch workaround helps.