Netflix pausing/buffering issues

Having fought this issue for two months, including trying replaced hardware, and working with several AppleCare reps at the highest level (who have been very helpful and sympathetic), I have given up and returned the Apple TV. There is an intermittent bug that lies somewhere between Apple and Netflix, and with no indication that they know what the problem is, let alone an expected date for a fix, I jumped ship to Roku. I have not had a SINGLE Netflix buffering incident on the Roku (or on any of the five other devices I tried on the same network).

Since this is an intermittent problem, it seems that some "fixes" work, yet my experience is that given a little time, the problem returns. My parting advice on this issue is to not waste any time dealing with it, and return the Apple TV if you can, until Apple says that they have fixed it. Although, now that I have tasted the Roku, I will not return even if it is eventually fixed.

I was inclined to agree with you and picked up a Roku box this evening while I'm still in a period of being able to return the AppleTV.

I got back home about 7:45pm. I hooked everything up and started the setup process. Everything looked good as I told the box to connect to the wired connection I'd provided and the black and white screen lighted green buttons as it connected.

First problem came next when the box launched its own software update. Everything came back on bright pink and blurred.

Then I tried to create an account. Three times I tried. I even started fresh with another email address and each time as I completed the process, the system advised me to login to my account and then said "Oops! We don't recognize that account.

I looked for and found the only live contact means by way of live chat (no telephone support evidently). That's when I found out their help desk closes at 8pm Pacific - WHAT?! That's prime time for people who are using these devices!

Not impressed with Roku at ALL!

I'm ready to can BOTH units and go back to Cable and DVD's.

I was having the stutter and buffering problem tonight with Netflix and my ATV2. After 20 minutes, it had stopped and started 6 times. The shortest stop was 5 seconds the longest was 3 minutes. I did a speed test and the wireless was coming in at 29 mbps. I then hardwired the ATV2 and still had the same issue. I finally gave up and switched to the MLB.TV on the ATV2. I have been watching MLB for 15 minutes. It has been streaming flawlessy with a great picture.

After reading everything and my experience tonight (and other nights with the Netflix stutter), I have to think it is an issue with ATV2 and Netflix. Apple and Netflix get together and fix please.

For the past several weeks, I have been working with the ATV2 development team through an Apple Corporate Executive Relations representative on the Netflix buffering issue reported in this thread and many others. I have the ability to capture and analyize the network packets that go to and from the device, and I have provided network traces and analysis to Apple from my home environment. So, the development team is aware of and working on the issue.

The ATV2 (or any other Netflix client) gets its content stream from a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is a third party who provides geographically distributed content caching. When you hit play on a Netflix program, the ATV2 is assigned a CDN server from one of three of these third party servers based on geography and where the content happens to be cached. I have found that when the content comes from one specific third party vendor's servers, it always buffers. It never buffers when the content comes from the other two. I do not know if this is true for every ATV2 customer, or just a subset of us, and what differences there might be between these two customer set environments (if the experiences do in fact differ). It is not a bandwidth issue or wireless issue.

I do not know if the root cause of the problem is with the ATV2, the specific CDN vendor, or Netflix (or some combination), and I do not have any insight into a fix plan or date, but I want to let all of you know that you are wasting your time trying to fix this yourself or trying to get Apple Care to fix it for you. Since it is a roll of the dice on which of the three CDNs you get for a given program, sometimes you make a change and it appears to have "fixed" the problem, but that's only because the program you watched when it worked happened to come from a different CDN vendor's servers, and the buffering problem will return if another show comes from the problem CDN vendor's servers.

I have also taken traces with my Roku, and interestingly it only gets content from a single CDN vendor.

As an aside, I have learned that the Roku uses a constant bit rate scheme and the ATV2 uses an adaptive variable bit rate scheme. This means that the ATV2 bit rate is lower relative to other devices, by design. So when we call Netflix and get our bit rates, and find the ATV2 to be much lower than other clients, we think that shows an ATV2 problem, when in fact it shows an ATV2 design difference.

That's really helpful info... thanks! (Not sure why I didn't think of firing up WireShark.) Anyway, you might want to work through this with Netflix as well. I've found them to be more willing to investigate but less willing to keep you in the loop. Regardless, the fix needs to come from Netflix since they wrote the Apple TV "app". You might need to fight a bit to get someone that understands what you're talking about, but if you've gotten this far, you're already used to that. Also, have you tried calling Level 3 directly? Maybe you can point them in the right direction and they'll just address the issue on their end...

Also, I wonder if there is something clever we can do networking-wise to route the bad server connection to one of the good ones...

Anyway please keep us posted!

Bradley Rubin wrote:

For the past several weeks, I have been working with the ATV2 development team through an Apple Corporate Executive Relations representative on the Netflix buffering issue reported in this thread and many others. I have the ability to capture and analyize the network packets that go to and from the device, and I have provided network traces and analysis to Apple from my home environment. So, the development team is aware of and working on the issue.

The ATV2 (or any other Netflix client) gets its content stream from a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is a third party who provides geographically distributed content caching. When you hit play on a Netflix program, the ATV2 is assigned a CDN server from one of three of these third party servers based on geography and where the content happens to be cached. I have found that when the content comes from one specific third party vendor's servers, it always buffers. It never buffers when the content comes from the other two. I do not know if this is true for every ATV2 customer, or just a subset of us, and what differences there might be between these two customer set environments (if the experiences do in fact differ). It is not a bandwidth issue or wireless issue.

I do not know if the root cause of the problem is with the ATV2, the specific CDN vendor, or Netflix (or some combination), and I do not have any insight into a fix plan or date, but I want to let all of you know that you are wasting your time trying to fix this yourself or trying to get Apple Care to fix it for you. Since it is a roll of the dice on which of the three CDNs you get for a given program, sometimes you make a change and it appears to have "fixed" the problem, but that's only because the program you watched when it worked happened to come from a different CDN vendor's servers, and the buffering problem will return if another show comes from the problem CDN vendor's servers.

I have also taken traces with my Roku, and interestingly it only gets content from a single CDN vendor.

As an aside, I have learned that the Roku uses a constant bit rate scheme and the ATV2 uses an adaptive variable bit rate scheme. This means that the ATV2 bit rate is lower relative to other devices, by design. So when we call Netflix and get our bit rates, and find the ATV2 to be much lower than other clients, we think that shows an ATV2 problem, when in fact it shows an ATV2 design difference.

Mark, a few responses:

- I don't know who wrote the ATV2 Netflix app.

- I am not naming the CDN vendors involved because I don't want to imply goodness or badness on the part of the vendor. It might turn out that the ATV2, my ISP (Qwest DSL) or my DSL modem (Actiontec M1000) play a role in this issue at the interface with the particular CDN vendor.

- Apple is already in technical contact with Netflix. Apple asked for my permission to get account-specific traces from Netflix, and Netflix has provided them to Apple. At this point, I think that if I contact Netflix and/or the CDN vendor, I will only create confusion. And, as you perceptively note, there is a huge amount of energy needed to run the gauntlet to get to the right people who can both understand and do something about the issue.

- Since Netflix is already making device-dependent CDN assignments, I have suggested to Apple that Netflix might temporarily stop assiging the ATV2 to the "problem" CDN vendor until the root cause is identified and resolved.

- I, too, have thought about a little hack that I might do on my end, like use a firewall to map the IP addresses from one CDN vendor to another (inbound and outbound), but there are a huge number of different addresses and even different IP ranges and I don't know if it would even authenticate properly if I did accomplish this.

- The wheels are turning slowly on this, but they are turning. My Apple contact has been excellent about keeping me in the loop, calling every few days with an update. Personally, I think that this will be wrapped up in some small number of weeks.

Bradley Rubin wrote:

My Apple contact has been excellent about keeping me in the loop, calling every few days with an update. Personally, I think that this will be wrapped up in some small number of weeks.

Thanks for your work on this. I have opened and escalated calls with Apple, Netflix and my ISP, and gotten pretty much nowhere. I even paid for Applecare so I could get a little attention from Apple, but I have not gotten far.

How did you get escalated as far as the dev team? I politely requested escalation from Apple first line support to a Sr. Advisor and then to asked the Sr. Advisor to escalate it to development, but did not get a responese. Another poster a few pages back got it escalated to devs, only to get the response that it is not apple it is Netflix.

Anyway, thanks again, I am glad there seems to be attention to this issue at the right levels now. Too bad there is not a way to link our support tickets to give them another data point, as I would be happy to run traces for them as well. But perhaps one user doing it is all they need.

Been reading this thread and have some of the same experiences w/ my ATV2. Best solution I've read was from one of the beginnings: Apple should introduce a subscription streaming service for it's iTMS. I'd pay a 3-4x per month premium on that service, too, if they could provide much more consistent quality service.

Bradley,

Speaking for those of us like myself who don't have the time or technical knowledge to deal with the guts of an issue like this, I want to thank you for your tenacity.

Please keep us posted as you hear updates.

I understand the problem has become fairly common knowledge even among those who haven't gotten on board with streaming as of yet. That bad word of mouth would behove Apple to get this problem resolved with Netflix before any more damage is done.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one with this problem. Our Wii, XBox and Sony have zero problems with Netflix, but the beloved Apple, frankly stinks. The last straw was when I was trying to watch a Who documentary in my man-cave, AKA Garage-Majal, AKA men's room. And the wife was watching a chick flick in the next room on the Wii with no problems.

I'm not sure how this posting works, but could someone please email me with the fix when its available?

sharkeysmachines@mac.com

Believe me, I have been just as frustrated as all of you on these threads. I am going to sound like an Apple apologist here, but this is a nasty problem for Apple to deal with for a variety of reasons. For example:

- My Netflix streaming was fine for the first 6 months that I owned it.

- I went to the Genius Bar at the Apple store and my unit worked fine.

- I had a hardware replacement and it worked fine for a few weeks.

- There is no way to restore to a specific firmware level other than the most current.

- The AppleCare Senior Advisor had me change my wireless channel and it worked (for a while).

- This problem apparently does not appear for a majority of customers, just us large minority.

- ISPs are starting to throttle bandwidth these days, which could lead to problems.

- People play with different DNS services such as OpenDNS and Google DNS, which might throw off the geographically sensitive CDN server selection.

- Two different companies are involved, which always complicates life.

- Video streaming is still a maturing technology.

- This problem seems to disappear with a "fix" or a "change", but then later reappears.

- Netflix reports a "throughput problem" with the ATV2 when we call.

- Netflix has changed its CDN server vendor mix twice last year alone.

- I am sure that there are a large number of people who report "buffering issues" that resolve with simple things like making sure you don't have wireless interference, that you are not accidentially connected to a neighbor's wireless, etc.

Taken as a whole, all the above bullet points form a pretty tangled mess!

When I got to the point that a direct wire connection to my DSL modem caused the ATV2 to buffer with about 30% of the shows, while the Roku performed flawlesly, and Apple store managers and Apple Care Senior Advisors gave up, I emailed Steve Jobs as a decade+ Apple fan who couldn't stand to see an Apple product fail while my five other Netflix clients (including the Roku) succeeded. And, I mentioned that there were plenty of others in the forums in the same situation. Frankly, being a software engineering professor who teaches graduate level networking didn't hurt in the technical credability department. And, for me, this is a really interesting technical puzzle too, so I am energized to help resolve it.

We are not done yet, and I still think there is a subtle unidentified issue that causes some, but not all, to have problems when connected to the specific CDN server vendor, but I am confident now that this will be resolved in the near future.

I don't know if this helps or just confuses everyone more, but my apple TV2 worked fine with netflix until I did their most recent firmware update. Now I have the buffering issue. Before the update it would only buffer occasionally and generally that was late in the evening. Can the firmware be set back to the factory version?

Once you update the firmware, you can't go back to a previous version. If you do a factory reset, it will automatically force an update to the latest level. Apple probably did this to minimize the support costs for dealing with old problems, but for this strategy to work they have to be really, really certain that they don't break anything that previously worked. I did not see any buffering for 2 weeks on firmware level 4.1.1, and do see it on 4.2.2, but this might be yet another red herring and the problem might be unrelated to firmware level.

I have to agree with wesleyfromstaunton. I do not rent movie's from Netflix. But I do rent movie's from iTunes. My ATV 2 has worked very well usually downloading a movie and ready to watch within 40 seconds until the last firmware update. Now it takes about 40 minutes before the movie is buffered up and ready to watch. The last movie paused half way through for several minutes then continued. I have tested my internet connection and it has a download speed of 5.25M which is typical. The last firmware update changed my ATV 2 behavior.

Status report from an ATV 2/Netflix user -- Weeks ago this problem largely went away for me. It seems that changes and updates by Apple and Netflix have resolved the issue. Now occasionally -- maybe once every few movies -- there are a couple of short (10 to 20 seconds) pauses. Most all movies play without incident. I did nothing at my end except to do the updates.