There are a couple of things that come into play when it comes to how flawlessly you can view streaming video. The biggest factor is your connection speed and how stable is it. Your download speeds of 15.87 and 20.8 are not great, but are good enough as long as they remain stable. Unfortunately, a lot of connections are not stable and fluctuate and this is probably the cause of your issues. Fluctuations can occur if your cable company has you on a node with others. As traffic goes up in your neighborhood your download speed will drop and you will get stalls since your current download speed is only marginal. Also, if there are other family members using other devices in your house your bandwidth will be shared between users causing the download speed to your iPad to drop. The best solution for this to upgrade your connection speed with your ISP if possible. Curt just upped his Comcast from 20 mbps to 105 mbps and is loving the difference it made. In some cases you can upgrade for free. I upgraded our Fios in the office about a year ago from 150 mbps to over 300 mbps and the the price was less than we were paying before. So we saved money by increasing our speed.
You may also have a problem with your wireless not being able to handle what is thrown at it. Not sure if you have ac3 wireless or not, but wireless is also something to look at as the technology has really improved over the years.
Also, you didn't say if you did a speed test at the time you had an issue? If you do a speed test at the time of the issue it will tell you a lot and will let know if your problem is because of a fluctuation in your connection speed. It's also good to take several test throughout the day to see if your speed is constant or not.
Glad to hear that the new streaming service is working for you. We're actually using the same people Apple turned to to help them with streaming content on iTunes. The new network has several advantages over our current network. First, we stream at three different bit rates instead of just one bit rate. This should help customers like you that have marginal download speeds since you can now select a lower quality feed by clicking on the players HD button. The good news is we've also really tweaked our settings so that our video files are smaller, but higher quality. This helps too. Lastly, our video files are on cached servers all over the world and this means you're usually only one hop away from connecting to one of our media servers - at the most two hops away. The less hops mean fewer buffering issues and a faster response time.
Now to answer you question about when will we move the rest of our videos to the new system? Well, that will depend on how things go this week. Our new player and delivery system is about as cutting edge as you can get in our industry. We've spent the last several months re-encoding every video in our library using every spare computer we have to do so. We're almost done and should finish this week. As long as things go well with the RWH videos on the new service we will start within the next week or so uploading and switching all of the current videos to the new system. But I don't want to get ahead of myself here as this is a very complicated new system to launch and we have to make sure it works for everyone. Though we have done extensive testing here, we don't have thousands of different devices and operating systems to test on, so the only way we can truly test the new system is to launch it and hope for the best.
Our goal is to finish transferring all of the rest of our OnDemand videos to the new system by the end of December, but as I mentioned before we will have to see how things go this week first. Then we will turn our focus to launching the online WB.
