Netflix’s Roku Player Facing Video Quality Problems

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Tech News
• Date: Dec 3,2008

Users of the Roku video streaming player have seen a noticeable degradation of video quality, as evidenced by forum posts on the Roku site. Roku’s aware of the problem, but according to the company, it’s made no changes, and it’s asking for end user help.

The Roku player, used with the Netflix service and costing only $100, has been a big hit, but since at least mid-November, when Roku started asking for information from end users, the video quality of streams has dropped from four dots (best) to one to two dots (the dots measure the Internet connection speed and thus quality).

The forum post from Roku says, in part:

Roku is aware that there are a number of users who have recently been experiencing inexplicable loss of video streaming quality, often going from a consistent 4 dots down to 1 dot quality. In an effort to try to gather as much data on this issue as possible for Roku and Netflix to analyze the situation and ultimately resolve it, we would like to request some information from anyone who is currently experiencing this problem. If you used to consistently get 3 or 4 dots of quality when streaming movies, and are now only able to get the 1 dot quality stream, we would like to know some particulars about your network environment. The info we need will only be used to analyze this particular issue and nothing else.

Besides end user location and Roku box serial number, questions seem to center around ISP, type of broadband service … anyone getting the drift yet? A Google map that shows the problems are pretty scattered across the country is here.

Some end users seem to have come to the conclusion that the “leading questions” seem to point to: some sort of network problem. For example, this thread says:

I’ve had 5 days off, much of which I spent assessing the performance / trouble shooting of my new Roku Box.

There is now no question in my mind that the problems I’ve had with it have to do with network congestion,,,,,and nothing else.

There are others. Now, Roku says they’ve made no changes, which seem to point to Netflix, or something between Netflix and end users’ boxes, such as Netflix’s content distribution network (CDN).

Tim Twerdahl, vice president of consumer products at Roku told C|Net:

“All we know is Roku didn’t make any changes. This is not a box problem. We know from some reports that this seems to be correlated with a change in Netflix’s content distribution network (CDN), and Netflix is trying to figure out what the issue is.”

C|Net indicated that most of the complaints were on Roku boxes, which makes sense: Roku was the first box released. C|Net also couldn’t find any complaints from other box owners, and neither could I, despite searching for quite some time.

Still, all the complaints seem to point to some bandwidth / infrastructure / throttling / CDN problem, something that would affect all boxes, despite the fact I saw one thread that said his Roku box had one dot; his Xbox 360 four.

I have posited that the bandwidth caps / throttling that ISPs seem wont to institute nowadays would come back to haunt us, and I still think, with the way content providers keep pushing us to use more bandwidth, whild ISPs want us to use less, that something’s going to give.

Whether or not this is the first sign of it, or if it is indeed a Roku box problem, is unknown as of yet.