[AFMUG] Direct TV on demand bandwidth

[Ken Hohhof]

Maybe everyone already knows this, but here's a graph from an experiment 
today with a customer watching an on-demand movie on Direct TV.

Customer said he had no problems with Netflix, Hulu, etc. but could not 
watch Direct TV on-demand stuff on his 3 Mbps connection.  Turns out it 
buffers up about 10 minutes of viewing time, then uses a constant 5 Mbps. 
Evidently there are not various bitrate streams, just 5 Mbps.  I can see why 
the customer was having problems on their 3 Mbps plan.

Another aspect of the behavior was annoying him.  He reported that usually 
the movie would start playing immediately, play for about 10 minutes, and 
then stop with a message about his Internet being too slow.  But in today's 
test, nothing happened for several minutes, until the display said it had 
downloaded about 10 minutes worth, then it started playing.  We concluded 
the first behavior happens when the start of the movie has been preloaded to 
their DVR, probably because it's a popular movie.  The second behavior, like 
today's test, happens when it first has to fill the buffer.