Having watched the two matches today, I really can’t believe how abysmal itvx is. Seemed to be relentless buffering, but somehow ads always play ok. Before anyone mentions it, my internet is absolutely fine as conducted several speed tests to reconfirm it is ‘crap’ itvx🙄 I assume others have a similar experience???
I must add that I was using the app and casting to the tv, so using the app. Now transferred to the actual internet site and seems to be better, but let’s see, as don’t want to imagine sitting through all that buffering again
I assume you are living in France. If so, dead simple. Watch the game on French TV. If you were physically present you would not get a commentary so what’s the difference? You can always turn the sound down a bit if you find the commentary really annoys you.
Yes that is maybe the best way to watch RWC, but in defence of ITVX, I watch it often for catch up and live online programs through NOW TV, and never any buffering. This with a 5mbs internet connection.
I have a login for M6, France televisions and TF1 so I can watch a match on iPad when not at home. We used it via a VPN when in Spain. When at home, we watch the tv of course with commentary in French.
Yes I am living in France. My reason for watching the rugby on itv is to enjoy the commentary and analysis, which I couldn’t enjoy as much right now on French tv. Over time, maybe a different case, but not right now. The final match yesterday proved to be better than watching via the app, but still not great. I just wonder why so many other streaming services can get it right but itv fail so dismally - very odd!
If you use the app on a device, laptop, phone etc and then cast an internet based stream onto another device, the TV, then I’m pretty sure it is the TV that actually does the streaming and not the app. Certainly with my google chromecast device this is how it seems to work. So, maybe It’s the TV rather than the app. When you said that the website seemed to work better, did you mean watching on say a laptop, or casting from the web browser to the TV, as any cast from a browser may be just a screen cast from browser to TV, where it will be the browser doing the streaming and the casting just being the browser casting a copy of the screen. Two different modes of casting.
I tried multiple sources to actually check. I tried it independently on the laptop, the iphone, the ipad, then casting to each of the two samsung tv’s which work perfectly for all other channels and subscription services. And none of routes gave a result. Previously I also previously used the firestick, which for perfectly well now for all other services, except itv.
ITVX is not the best app around, with buffering and colour smearing on all our devices, whether her or in the UK, pc or android, but neither was it’s predecessor or STV app fantastic either.
A stupid thing is when you are using headphones and start the app up, the thudding opening noise the app makes makes you wince in its loudness, it’s still better than i player though
I just wonder why, in today’s technological era, when almost anything seems possible, itv makes such a hash of it. All the competition gets it right, so why not them. But what amazes me is how the adverts still run ok - very strange. Just wondering if the radio runs a commentary, so I could watch on French tv and listen to English commentary
The only other mainstream app we have problems with is Sky Go, but it has nearly always been dodgy, I find it incredible that an business like Sky can make such a constant mess of the app
It’s like they have went out of their way in the last ten years to piss of their customers with 3rd rate programmers when you look at their help forums.
Other than their efforts to block VPNs, I find iPlayer to be very good. It even works on UHD content, which I didn’t expect. Having said that, it’s the only catch up app that I use so I don’t really have a comparison.
My real beef with iPlayer is any major event they never have the server bandwidth to cope with the number of people watching, football, rugby, golf can be a real lottery when watching, either mismatched audio or buffering, and this is with a 500+mb connection, it happens in the UK as well so is nothing to do with VPN connections.
That really shouldn’t be an issue. With streaming services, if say there are are ten times as many people watching, it doesn’t take ten times the bandwidth. It could actually take around the same bandwidth. Streaming services use a protocol called multicast, where the same stream can be sent to many people simultaneously without having to send individual streams to multiple endpoints. In fact, live streams are ideal as you can guarantee that many people are watching the exact same content at the same time. For other iPlayer style non live content, there are other distributed data strategies that are used to minimise bandwidth. Bottom line is, it’s not a bandwidth issue. Or it shouldn’t be if it’s done properly.
I wish that were true - around 2000 I was involved with broadcast TV over IP and video on demand projects and we fervently hoped IP multicast would work, especially for “broadcast” TV - but the fact of the matter is that it’s not a thing outside private networks as it’s more often than not blocked at routers.
Admittedly content delivery networks mean that the ultimate content provider does not have to support n individual streams for n viewers but the final leg is unicast so the system as a whole has to provide that much capacity.
Edit: E.g. streaming BBC news live shows the programme material is arriving from a cloudfront server - but definitely HTTPS on a unicast address - maybe it is delivered to cloudfront via multicast but I doubt it. The need for CDN “fan out” probably explains the significant lag seen with “live” TV - in the order of 30s to 1 minute.
The network always has to be able to support the full bandwidth somewhere, but the further downstream from the provider the better. I was involved in an IP multicast system for a large European broadcaster in about 2010 ish, and they seemed to make it work, although I believe they did have to install a lot of downstream equipment in order to make it work properly. I was just involved in the software in the customer premises equipment and not the network infrastructure so how they made it work I couldn’t say. We did our bit to support the multicast architecture they wanted and they did the rest.
Either ways, a lot of people find i player to be a stuttering, buffering mess during live popular events, the amount of complaints on the forums attest to that.
Yes I am using a vpn to access itv as I live in France. But if you go on trustpilot you can see all the other reviews if frustrated folks trying to use itvx, so I don’t think it’s vpn related.
