Since I have you here, can I ask a random question? My kids love Puffin Rock, and it's the only show that I would have issues streaming. It would start out fine, but a few minutes into it start buffering and would take minutes; resume for a bit, then do the same thing.
When this happened I could switch to any other Netflix show or movie and it worked perfectly fine. When the kids whined, I'd switch back to Puffin Rock and the problem would persist.
So my question is: is it possible that either some shows are encoded differently so my player had trouble with it? Or is it that specific content was being messed with by my ISP?
The players in question were Roku 2 and 3, and my ISP is Charter (business plan). I haven't tried this in a few months since it got really annoying, but can try again if it helps.
Another Netflix engineer here - have you tried with something not popular? It may be that the other shows you checked were cached via OpenConnect but Puffin Rock wasn't.
My email is my username at netflix.com. If you can send me the email address connected to your account, I can see that your problem gets to the right people. (Disclaimer: I'm not on the OC or related teams directly)
I also have a question. According to fast.com, my connection is 270 mbp/s (which jives with the official 500 mbps I'm getting). Yet, I've noticed that on chrome on mac, when I launch a new show, it often starts at a very low bitrate and then gradually switch to a higher bitrate. The problem is that this happen on every episodes.
One workaround is using the ctrl-option-shift S combination and manually set the bitrate to the highest settings but it's still a bit annoying.
Have you tried the "Adjust your Netflix playback settings" advice at https://help.netflix.com/en/node/11559 ? Not that I haven't seen this adaptive stream behaviour, but I find it affects my mobile devices (like iPads) far more than on a wired, desktop computer.
You could also try it on a PC/laptop and then check other streaming servers (right CDN column) by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Shift-s. Or check the current stream quality / buffer state with Ctrl-Alt-Shift-d.
When this happened I could switch to any other Netflix show or movie and it worked perfectly fine. When the kids whined, I'd switch back to Puffin Rock and the problem would persist.
So my question is: is it possible that either some shows are encoded differently so my player had trouble with it? Or is it that specific content was being messed with by my ISP?
The players in question were Roku 2 and 3, and my ISP is Charter (business plan). I haven't tried this in a few months since it got really annoying, but can try again if it helps.