My streaming channels keep loading slow and buffering! I don't know what to do!

Anybody have any thoughts? Any help would be appreciated.

Streaming sucks. Go back to physical media.

If your on a pc or laptop open the task manager and see what your internet connection is at also check to see if something is maxing out your memory or CPU. If on mobile your data might be throttled due to high traffic or data limits. Could also be a situational issue due to high internet traffic in your area or outages. My advice is wait it out and see if it improves if not maybe restart your router. See if that helps you at all.

Thanks, I'll do that!

I bet that is how the U.S. Postal Service feels as well......e.g. in the 1990's I used to spend 20K per year on buying stamps to ship packages to all my customers VHS tapes in the mail....and last year I only spent $150 on annual postage expenses.....so that is why the Post Office is going bust. The Post Office derives most of it;s revenue these days from junkmailers and would go bankrupt if it did not service it's number one client, Jeff Bezos.

But my wife loves streaming and the death of phyiscal media.....i.e. in the 1990's she had to go to the Post Office every day with large cart with 20-30 packages per day, and stand in long lines to get them done. These days she only goes to the Post Office once a month with a tiny dvd envelope she can fit inside her handbag,

MK

Yeah, but I can download a file I buy from Wamtec, which means that as long as I QC it and keep it backed up, I can play it forever, on whatever device I'm using in ten years. If I could do that with movies, that'd be fine. But streaming? Too many ways for that to suck.

An interesting note, I saw a mail truck on Sunday. Basically Amazon pays the postal service to do what they have NEVER done before, deliver on Sunday.

Yep, with Amazon Prime the mailman will bring me stuff on Sunday. Which honestly is a bit excessive ... although I do miss the days when Netflix shipped discs six days a week.

Nobody is taking away your preference to be able to download and keep those files forever on your hard drive. Streaming is merely an alternative option to downloads, not a replacement for downloads.

The consumer has driven the evolution of streaming video, because many consumers no longer wish to pay for full price download and prefer a low low cost (pennies per video) streaming option instead. Media content producers have to face the reality that unless they offer streaming options they will soon go the way of the dinosaurs.

Look at what happened to Blockbuster video....they made the most colossal mistake since Xerox gave away their Windows invention to Bill Gates of Microsoft....i.e. Blockbuster video were offered the chance to buy a fledgling streaming company for a mere 50 million dollars....and they passed on this offer because they did not see a future in streaming and they preferred to stick with physical video rentals instead. Guess what.....Blockbuster went bankrupt and closed all it's stores and that streaming company they could have bought for a mere 50 million is now worth 3.7 Billion dollars...and is called NETFLIX. Sheer stubbornness led to the demise of Blockbuster video.

https://www.businessinsider.com/blockbuster-ceo-passed-up-chance-to-buy-netflix-for-50-million-2015-7

Streaming is only a cheap low cost option that is offered to consumers.....i.e. would you prefer to pay $9.99 to see 1 movie at a movie theater or pay $200 per month to get all the movie channels on cable.....or would you prefer to pay $9.99 per month to stream 100,000+ movies and tv series in the Netflix streaming library,

As this relates to wam....none of the wam producers are doing away with their download stores, they are just adding a secondary option to those who want a low cost streaming option. In my case....I have over 1200 videos in my UMD download store, and folks can buy those downloads a la carte for $10 or less.....or....folks can watch over 1200 of my videos streaming in my UMD streaming area...for only $30 per month....i.e. streaming videos are only 0.025 cents per video. And.....whats more, thanks to Messmaster inventing his coupon code system, we now offer an 80% off coupon on all our download videos...to streaming members....so if a video costs $10 to download, streaming members can apply their coupon and get any stream they want to keep, as a download file, for only $2, instead of the full price.

All this adds up to a great deal for consumers.

Sure...I would prefer if most most consumers bought downloads in high volumes the way they used to do 10 years ago....but that is not happening anymore. The trend is towards Netflix style streaming, so wam producers have no choice but to get on board that train, otherwise the train will leave the station and they will go the same way as Blockbuster video did.

If you think that a great deal like 1200 videos for $30 a month sucks.....your name must be Nancy Pelosi...ha ha

MK

I do think it sucks, because image quality is my top priority. Unfortunately the popularity of the streaming bargain buffet is making that harder and more expensive to get than it used to be.

Forunately downloads and streaming are co-existing in wam porn (for now!) but you're already starting to see some major mainstream titles (so far just the ones Netflix is acquiring, like MUDBOUND and MEYEROWITZ STORIES) not getting disc releases at all.

Most wam fans are willing to accept the lower quality of streaming with it's less than 1 cent per video price, when offered the choice of an HD video at the highest bit rate quality at a full price of $10 per video.

Believe me.....I have conducted numerous test marketing studies in recent years......offering my media in 4 different qualities.....i.e.

- the highest HD quality I have, which is 30mbps quality burned to a Blu Ray disk and shipped by mail with free shipping, and at the same price as my download store files.

- offering my download store files at lower 12mbps quality at 1080p

- offering my download store files at a lower 5mbps quality at 720p

- offering my media at a lower streaming quality

The results of all my test marketing strategies were conclusive...i..e nobody gave a damn about my highest quality Blu Ray disks and I could count those orders with the fingers on one hand. Few people seemed to care about my 1080p HD download files either.....because I was offering 720p download files for a few years, and then upgraded to 1080p and my sales continued to drop lower and lower....so offering a 1080p version did nothing for my sales....and so I returned to offering files at 720p because that was the optimum quality most people were content with. I only started offering streaming 5-6 years later when my download sales had dropped by 80%....and then a few people signed up for streaming and were content with that.

I understand your opinions from a consumer perspective....you want the best quality.....the problem is....there is only one Regis in the world...and as a producer I would need at least 300 Regis's ordering media from me on a regular basis......and I don't see 300 people like Regis supporting my sites.

This is what I was saying.....the consumers drive the wam marketplace and what they want will drive the market. One person and their views does not drive a market....producers can only produce content when they get support from enough people....not 1 person.

MK

One minor correction, and I may be wrong. Jobs and whose name I can't spell got GUI from Xerox' labs in NoCal.

Also, another problem is that the SoCal Republicans (can't think of his name, but it's not Rohrbacher) wanted to kill USPS by having it pay pensions 75 years forward...not good accounting practices.

I have never really understood the nature of USPS and why they were required to fund their pension system for several years in advance, USPS have alway claimed that, but for their pre-funded pension obligations they would not lose billions every year and they would be a profitable enterprise......but that is like saying "we would be a great company.....if it were not for all these of pesky employees we have to pay salaries and give benefits to".

It is ironic that Bernie Sanders is currently attacking Jeff Bezos for supposedly paying his employees low wages and benefits at Amazon....which is not true because Amazon employess are paid fairly and given good benefits......especially as Jeff Bozos is now the biggest client of USPS. How come Amazon makes billions in profits while every year USPS loses billions. Perhaps the best thing would be for the U.S. Postmaster General to resign and just let Jeff Bezos run USPS...because he more or less controls most of the USPS business these days anyways.

I have to laugh at how big government solves problems......i.e. when people used to complain about the long lines and waiting times at the Post Office....their solution was not to try and improve customer service by increasing the staff at the service stations.....but instead they issued a memo to all Post Office to take down the clocks that were on the wall....so that people in line would stop looking at the time going by....ha ha

Yes, exactly, the mainstream equivalent of these people are the asshats who are making my life a lot more expensive and frustrating.

Oh, this is for Mark. REA stuck with trains...ever hear of REA?

Western Union turned down the chance to buy ATT.

Wow....you must be doing things wrong if life is more expensive for you today that it was before....because....

- in the 1980's the only way for me to satisfy my need to find wam scenes was to belong to over 40 video rental stores in South Florida and I used to go out every 2-3 days and bring back dozens of tapes to scan thru. I used to spend over $500 per month on VHS tape rentals - today you can find all that stuff for free on Youtube.

- in the 1980's I paid over $9000 to have 4 C and K band 16 ft satellite dishes installed in my back yard, so I could watch tv stations around the world and grab wam scenes -- today you can watch over 10,000 overseas tv stations by paying only $25 to buy an Amazon Fire Stick or Roku device to watch overseas TV via the internet,

- I used to pay over $600 per month to subscribe to hundreds of premium channels on Cable TV, Dish Network and Direct TV....each bill was over $200 per month. These days I dropped all those services because I can get the same tv channels and movies on Netfix for a mere $9 per month.

I have "cut the cord" now and save over a $1000 per month by getting rid of all my video club memberships, sat dishes and premium services and getting it all off the internet, where my 150 megabit internet service only costs $60 per month,

My video entertainment hobbies are 10 times cheaper today than they used to be in the 1980's.

MK

Well, I'm not talking about acquiring mainstream wam scenes, which I mostly leave to you and Google these days.

But yes, I used to be able to rent all of the movies I watched from a video store for $2-$4 each, and then from about 2005-2010 I could get them from Netflix for even less. Apart from importing some titles that hadn't been releases in the US, that was all I had to spend. Now that the video stores are all out of business and Netflix rarely stocks any new catalog titles (and even skimps on some new releases), I end up buying a couple hundred Blu-rays a year. Some of those get resold on eBay but overall it's a lot more expensive than it used to be, and will get even worse whenever Netflix and/or Redbox pull the plug on discs completely.

You wrote that you "can get the same tv channels and movies on Netfix for a mere $9 per month" but if you think that you're getting fooled by the algorithm that pushes forward "recommendations" of what they do license and conceals what they don't. Even if you subscribe to all the major platforms (Hulu, Amazon, Filmstruck, etc.), which of course starts to add back up to the equivalent of a cable package, the selection is a fraction of what a well-stocked video store used to have. And of course the reliability and image quality are significantly less than you get with Blu-ray.

Mark, were you able to deduct those expenses for business purposes? I know the tax laws in '78 or so and the '86 tax code took a lot of that away.

Of course not, because my video rental and clip collecting habits in the 1980's were just my private hobby in those days.

But when I started making commercial videos with my own models in the 1990's then I did manage to get a few tax breaks....i.e. expensing computer hardware, video cameras etc......and I did get some tax breaks for my vacations overseas, because if I went overseas and hired models and shot some media while on a trip, that was then classified as a business trip.

The tax rules in the USA are very complicated....il.e. if you want to claim your house as a home office you can only claim a percentage of the home's square footage that you use as your home office as a tax deduction....not the entire house. Likewise if you use your car for business you can only claim for the miles you drive your car for business purposes, not for the times you use your car for personal use. Likewise, I use the internet most of the time for business purposes, not for personal use.....but my ISP does not provide with me with data on how much internet surfing I do to update my websites versus how much time I spend on pleasure surfing....so I can only take a wild guess that if my monthly data transfer activity is 1TB per month, I know that at least 70% of that relates to updating my 27 websites, but I have no hard data from my ISP to document that....so I just take a wild guess and claim for 70% of my ISP charges. If the IRS wish to dispute that.....I will refer them to my ISP if they wish to check my data usage.

MK

Mark, one of the problems with the tax code is are carve-outs for the "boys." And perceived abuses of the code that began in the Carter years, when he was taken with Proxmire.

Jesus, am I a fucking nerd.

You lost me there, Bear in mind I am not an American and did not live in the USA during the Carter years....I only moved to the USA during the Reagan years.

I was in the UK in the 1970's, where instead of the IRS we had to deal with the UK's "Inland Revenue".....where people often refer to the Benny Hill joke "I don't need to pay taxes to the Inland Revenue, because I live on the coast".

Streaming does not equal image quality loss.

Mostwam.tv and Customwam.tv both stream 4K video, which is higher resolution than our downloads, they are 1080p.
This is of course, dependant on your internet connection, the videos on our streaming sites are transcoded into multiple sizes, so that the best resolution based on your internet connection is delivered.

Interestingly, at the moment, downloads and streaming are 50/50 of our sales. It's a fairly even split. So we are not about to abandon downloads.

Looking at what people watch our streaming content on is interesting.
According to our site's analytics, our streaming content is mostly watched on mobile devices.
A much more convenient method for getting your jollies.

Wait, so you have 4K files for your videos but you're not selling them as downloads? Why is that?

The limits of downloads.

The UMD has a limit of 1.25 GB per file, which means we'd have to chop up our videos too much.

The Mothership is too slow for people outside the US, so downloading a 4k file would take WAY too long.

So for now, we are sticking to a very good quality 1080p MP4 for our downloads, they are very good Full HD files.

The streaming service we use, has multiple international servers, so in any place, so in theory, the speeds are the same, only dependant on the ISP you use. If you are watching in the UK, you are watching from a UK server, if you're in the US, you are watching from an American server.

The video sizes available streaming are:
2160p (22105 kbps)
1440p (12094 kbps)
1080p (5111 kbps)
720p (2629 kbps)
540p (1628 kbps)
360p (634 kbps)

As I said, the system will deliver the best size based on your connection and device.

Unless you use a PC, doing so you can leave it on auto, or select the video size you want.

Try it:
https://mostwam.tv/programs/lisa-tests-our-mud-dunk-tank
(sorry, she's fully clothed)

I guess the sales for mens raincoats must be high in Northern European countries. That would explain why many guys look like Columbo on the morning train to work That may explain why we find that most of our customers have the opposite trend, and prefer to stream on the pc or laptop in the privacy of their own home and most of our members do not like to watch wam on their mobile devices....i.e. you can't wear a raincoat in a hot climate country. As for watching wam on a mobile when you are on a plane, I would not advise it....the seats are so tight these days if you have an erection they would need fire rescue services to use the jaws of life to cut you out of your seat,