Hello fellow UMD users,

I have a streaming subscription for a month now and at least half the time I am watching a video it will either stutter/buffer or stop playing completely with the error: Error loading media: file could not be played

I work in IT myself and have never had this much problems with video streaming to my home. Sites like Youtube or Mostwam work perfectly almost all the time.

Are other users from Europe having these problems? I already mailed the webmaster a couple of times and am loosing my trust in this service

Kind regards,

a user from the Netherlands

Thanks for working with me over inbox on this. Every now and then we've been touching on our bandwidth caps. Though I'm still not sure that was the problem in your case, you did let me know it's working fine today so thanks.

Still, I've been working to add a new server to our little cloud system on the East cost USA, so we will get another 100mbps of bandwidth closer to you very soon. I'll respond to your latest inbox message later tonight.

I do have that problem to but only if I'm using a weeker internet connection. Like a friend house or something.

Distance has the most effect on speed and reliability. More distance equals more routers, switches, and transit networks in the path, which means more chances for something to go wrong. There's also the issue of the speed of light in a fiber. It's not physically possible for two locations on opposite sides of the planet to have "instant" communications.

All major sites are distributed via licensing deals with expensive global CDNs (content distribution networks) which are networks of caching servers located in the data centers of every major ISP. When you watch a YouTube video, you are not connecting to YouTube in the US. The stream you are watching is coming from a caching server right down the road from your house. For most people, it will be less than 10-20 miles away, which, for all intents and purposes, is in the "instant" ballpark. Virtually every site in the top 100 busiest sites works the same way, as do most of the top 1000.

The majority of smaller sites do not have that speed/reliability assistance. Small amounts of completely static content can be cached for free/cheap using services like CloudFlare but it gets prohibitively expensive real fast with gigabyte-size video files. It's also too expensive to use cloud services when you are dealing with hundreds of terabytes of video storage.

Although various caching and relay services are in use for both, you won't see a massive global CDN serving sites like the UMD or Vidown. A connection to either site means your data has to travel all the way from Seattle, Dallas, Las Vegas, or one of our other mostly US-based data centers to wherever in the world your computer is currently located. On the modern internet, that still isn't usually a problem beyond somewhat slower transfer speeds for international connections, but the main bottleneck has always been UK/EU ISPs with inadequate bandwidth outside the local area. Transoceanic fiber traffic is expensive and ISPs don't want to pay for any more of it than they absolutely have to. A lot of them will see massive congestion during "prime time" hours during the business day and the early evening. When Vidown customers experience a slowdown, I generally recommend that they try again after 10:00pm. That almost always does the trick.

Yet.

Toudai and other universities have had actual success in teleportation of quantum information.
We've seen technologies from Star Trek come to life in our generations. I doubt we'll live to see instantaneous communication in our lifetimes let alone actual teleportation EVER (see Heisenberg Principle)

https://interestingengineering.com/japanese-researchers-teleport-quantum-information-into-a-diamond


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAUOPHqx5Gs

Thanks for your replies. At the moment it works OK

I am happy with the fast responses from the webmaster and the performance is usually better after he makes some chances

Happy messing from the Netherlands

Been working on this for weeks, but just a few minutes ago I launched our new file server and am diverting some traffic to that. It will give us another 100mbp/s of bandwidth. Still monitoring things....

Thanks Soundguy for that amazing explanation.
Messmaster