Instant Watching Throttling???

[Jeremiah]

Ok, so I've read about how Netflix has been accused or admits to "Throttling" it's more frequent users, but I want to throw this one into the fray and see what kind of a wild fire I start.
I use Instant Watching a lot! Like all the time at work! I just opened my browser and the netflix site runs it's little "Video Quality Test" and it says that it is "Basic" which means, you're on a slow network with a slow broadband connection, right? ok.
So I go to Speedtest.net and run a connection test to a site 150 miles away, and it says that I'm pulling down 12.6 Mb/ps I know pretty speedy!
So what's the deal with my poor video quality? It seems like once I watch a certain amount of hours per week, I start having quality issues or I start getting ridiculous load times like over 2 hours!
Anyone else experience this?
I LOVE the instant watching feature I just hope I'm not getting punished for using what I've subscribed to and have gone out and told all my friends about... That would be lame.

[hotrod]

We all have the same problem whether we we have cable or dsl. I believe the problem is with netflix. Instant Watch was not very popular in the beginning. Now it is overwhelmingly popular that their servers can't handle the load (my theory). Has anyone contacted NF for an explanation?

[Xero Kewl]

Not to be slightly off-topic with my reply, but I bet if NF is behind the mess, it's due to people wanting to get the most out of their memberships due to their own throttling methods, therefore, more people on IW. It's a sad cycle they have produced for themselves and they never seem to learn their lesson even when sued. I'll tolerate NF until I start having IW issues, then I am truly done. On to another provider I suppose if that happens to me...

[dogmania]

Jeremiah,
For one thang dude,,,I want your JOB!!! I have the same problem...I really think it's your ISP,ok so,where do I apply now?

[Xero Kewl]

I have been using IW quite a bit and have DSL at a 1.5mb or less up/down load. Somehow I watch stuff fine, but then again, I am often watching 40-50 minute tv eps on IW, not full movies. This may be why I have yet to encounter issues. Good luck with it.

[Adrian]

Sorry to hear you are having issues. There are no throttling or bandwidth limits on the IW service itself. I think some problems could be caused by bandwidth throttling in the network (especially in a work context). Some of the other problems may just be bugs that come and go from time to time as we tinker with the service and the player. It's a work in progress to solve a hard problem, and sometimes fixes for one issue make something else worse....

Adrian from Netflix

[John Blake]

Recently my Instant Watching performance has tanked. The movie will be fine for well over an hour, and then I start getting "Your Internet connection has slowed..." Once that happens, it keeps happening repeatedly. It's like having a long commercial break every couple of minutes. How about allowing us to buffer more video to help prevent this? (The Netflix quality test indicates I have a high speed connection.)

[Daniel J. Doughty]

Adrian,

Looks like the service is down at the moment. I'm getting "Watch Instantly Service Temporary Unavailable" for the last 20 minutes or so. Any idea what's going on?

Thanks,
Dan

[Adrian]

We apologize for the outages this weekend.

We had a maintenance upgrade late Friday night / Saturday morning that took part of the service offline for a few hours. There have been a few short outages since then as we have had to tinker with the system to get it working right. It seems to be running well now, so we hope it stays that way (especially the Netflix staff who have worked on this through Friday night and the weekend).

In general we are upgrading the systems that make up the Instant Watch service and working on how we run them, so that they will be more available and resilient in the future, however the changes needed to get to where we want to be, will sometimes make us take the service offline.

Adrian from Netflix

[UncleBob]

I noticed the outage, but I sure wouldn't complain.

The initial rollout of Instant Watch, and the kick into high gear that the Roku box must be causing have been remarkably trouble-free on the user side -- but I'll bet there's been a goodly share of nightmares at your end. You guys have done a terrific job of keeping those troubles on your plate and off of ours! Sincere thanks!

[Daniel J. Doughty]

Yeah, I pretty have the same thing to say. I'm hoping you're designing in better redundancy, but I understand how it can be hard rolling out a new service so quickly. And the great customer service pretty much eases all of my natural grumpiness about outages.

[Scott P]

Just hit back and try again. Last night for the first time I got the "too slow" message and it said my show would start in an hour. I just went back and selected the episode and it started right away with no problem.

[Dave]

Comcast has admitted to doing this to customers when called under subpoena to give testimony before congress. What was a great little tidbit in the testimony was the fact that most ISP providers "share" info on high bandwith users and keep a common file of them that is often targeted my music industry for illegal downloading. read the fine print in your contracts, you are not even given any right to privacy anymore.