# Flaky streaming



## LostInTheTrees (Nov 1, 2013)

Why is Tivo streaming so flaky? I have been a heavy user of this, but have found it to be extremely unrealiable. I've used it for months in Denmark while I was away from home. I've used it in hotels all the way across the country. I just never know when it will work. When I access Netflix it almost invariably works perfectly, meaning the network hosting the Tivo App is not the problem.

Just last week I was trying to watch from my daughter's house in MD. My Tivo is in Tucson. The network in Tucson shows upload speeds of 9 mbps on 2.4 GHz, 12+ on 5GHz, download speeds are 120 mbps. I have a new ac1900 state of the art router. In MD, I also upgraded their router to an AC1900. They have FIOS and so get 30+ mbps both up and down. The connection was pretty much unusable the whole 12 days we were there.

The one time I tried to stream in house, it totally failed. What? That's supposed to be the easy case.

I often see a pattern where it will fail, fail, fail, not connect at all for a few minutes and then all of sudden work correctly. As a software developer, this makes me think that the system has restarted. It is as if over time the running system accumulates problems (memory leak perhaps). Then the stress of trying to stream exacerbates the issue to the point where the system reboots. With a fresh reboot it works.

I have looked, but there is NO apparent way to remotely reboot the system. This would be a good addition as far as I am concerned. Yes I understand there are potential problems with programs currently recording.

Since streaming first came out it has improved enormously, but it still really needs work.

And why isn't Skip supported? That should be very easy to add.

Can anyone help me understand why the Tivo streaming is so flaky?

-Bob


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## MacBrian (Feb 24, 2002)

LostInTheTrees said:


> Can anyone help me understand why the Tivo streaming is so flaky?
> 
> -Bob


I was reading your post and it reminded me of how much trouble I used to have with streaming in the iOS app at home. It was totally useless outside of my home network to either download or stream because of so many errors.

I had an AT&T U-Verse 2-wire "universal gateway" as my router at the time. I switched to an Apple Airport Extreme router and found some instructions on the internet to "dumb down" my AT&T gateway and let the Apple be in charge. After that my experience with streaming in the iPad and iPhone iOS apps has been 99% flawless. I don't do much outside my home network, but whenever I have it's worked OK.

Your problems sound kinda similar, so I'm wondering if there is something in some router's default settings that might be causing problems and I just got lucky with the Extreme in that it works OK.

Routers are such a worm-hole of esoteric settings though...yeesh....one tiny little tweak could make all the difference in the world...but how to discover it?

I feel your pain...unfortunately I have no concrete solution, just maybe an idea of where to look...


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## lemansiii (May 13, 2016)

LostInTheTrees said:


> Can anyone help me understand why the Tivo streaming is so flaky?
> 
> -Bob


OOH streaming uses a proxy, and I think that's part of the problem. Maybe the Tivo proxies are overloaded. It would be nice if they published a health and load graph of the proxies so we can try again when they aren't as loaded.

There is a way to restart the Stream in the Tivo app.
Gear -> Stream - System Information

However, I have my Tivo Stream plugged into a Belkin WEMO (D-Link also makes a better one), so I can remotely cycle power on it. It used to lock up all the time, but they seem to have fixed those bugs.

Scott


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