Issue watching NOW TV - high levels of buffering for 4 days now

[Anonymous User]

I've had my box since May 2015 and have been extremely lucky to have not had any problems at all. I was an Entertainment customer first and loved it so much I signed up for Movies.  My comments have always been 10/10, would most certainly recommend, it's changed my life etc.  Not any more.  I'm extremely frustrated.

I came back from holiday on the 25th August, and since then I've not been able to watch a single thing through my box.  It takes forever to load, and once I'm finally in there's an average of 4 seconds of programme to 30-60 seconds of buffering.  I'm acutely aware that I'm soon to lose Ray Donovan, a series I've been watching, upt to Series 3 episode 3. and planning to binge watch from my return as it goes in a matter of days.  I struggles through episode 3 thinking this was just one of those things, and everygthing would return to normal soon.  It didn't.

Here's the thing: I'm paying for a service having paid the initial purchasing of the box, and I am expected to trouble shoot the issue myself!  No helpline, no technical assistance at the end of a phone.  So I scoured the forums and am shocked at the high level of customers complaining about this very issue.  If this issue has been so commonplace for years, why is it still happening?!!!  Reluctantly and resentfully I've tried the following to no avail:

Backed out of the programme and reloaded

Backed out of the application and reloaded

Backed out of it altogether and reloaded

Checked the wires at the back of the box

Unplugged, waited 10 seconds and replugged

Checked my smart blu ray player - I can watch Demand 5 and Netflix absolutely no problem.  And have never had any problem at all with loading and buffering. Coming out so much in advance of NOW TV at the moment!!!!

Found the Platform Secret Screen and enabled network pings

After this I gave up, because I had to sign in again, and the sign in box just hung there, then went split screen between the keyboard and My TV.  I pressed home after a while of waiting for it to do something, went to find Ray Donfovan again and lo and behold it solved nothing!  Very slow loading. Tried Episode 4, it hung there for ages, got the programme eventually and within 4 seconds started buffering again.

As much as I have loved NOW TV this is seriously affecting my viewing pleasure and the fact that I have to come here and write to you should not be part of the solution.  Who knows when and how it will be resolved?  By which time Ray will have come and gone.  And by the way, what has happened to My TV?!  It used to be that It held where I was up to with all my viewing.  I could click on the series and it would take me to the season and episodes I had just watched.  All I had to do was click on the next episode.  Now it just holds the last epidode I have watched.  What good is that?  I have to search for the series I'm watching, click through the seasons, and then click through all the episodes to find the last one I watched.  All very frustrating and time consuming - why has this changed?

Please let me know a solution so that I can watch my NOW TV box, today would be great.  Otherwise I'm going to have to seriously rethink how much money you are taking from me for an extremely poor service.

[Anonymous User]

My apologies, I thought I was writing this to the NOW TV technical team, and have only just realised it's the customer's help forum for other customers to give me a hand.  Obviously my rant was not aimed at you!

Just in case anyone out there does have any ideas on what I can do (I've sent an email to NOW TV now) while I am waiting for them to get back to me, I've checked the bitrate too as advised elsewhere on this board, but unfortunately that didn't help.  On 3.5 it made no difference, on 2.5 it was marginally better but the programme quality kept going in and out, the screen kept blacking out and it's still buffering.

Once again my apologies and thanks for reading my rant and to anyone who may be able to help.

[Anonymous User]

Hi @Anonymous User

Sorry to hear that your experiencing some issues when watching our content.

From what you describe it sounds like this could be down to a speed issue where the NOW TV Box isn't picking up the full signal from your router.

Would you be able to carry out the following for me please.

Switch off your router at the wall for 30 seconds, then start this back up.

Once your router has established the connection to the Internet again could you carry out a hard reset of your NOW TV Box by following the instructions here.

You will need to enter your WI-FI details and NOW TV username and password again.

Let me know if this improves anything for you.

Thanks

Andy

[Anonymous User]

Hello there Andy 

Thanks very much for your help.

Unfortunately the router is in my landlady's room and she's away at the moment.  I've read on this forum though that this makes the prolem much worse, ie, not accepting wifi password of username and password details  

The funny thing is it worked fine last night for 3 episodes of Ray Donovan!  Only very slight buffering which was cleared by backing out of the series.  And then, unfortunately the massive buffering problems started happening again 

Before I started watching, I had checked manually for an update, and manually restarted from the system menu.

I did get a response from NOW TV but they asked me to do things I didn't have a clue how to do:

Hard Reset Technical Steps

Factory Reset Settings - I have seen this in system settings and again have read comments on this forum that for some people it's made the problem much worse!  So I'm a little bit cautious about doing this 

They asked for the serial number of the box

I emailed them back the same day 29th August but haven't received a response yet.

Once again, thanks very much for your help 

[Anonymous User]

I'm pretty hopeless a this - I clicked on thanks to thank Andy for trying to help me and I think it's closed my conversation when really it's not been resolved at my end.

I was hoping for some more clarification on what was happening now, and possibly why I've not heard back from NOW TV yet from the email I sent 29th - I didn't realise clicking on thanks would mean the answer is accepted, although it kind of is, I just can't get to the router to see if that's the problem.  It's wierd that it worked for 3 episodes and then went again.... 

[schnapps]

@Anonymous User

A couple of quick questions.

How many tenants in the rented accommodation use the same internet connection from your landlady Router ?

Have you got any idea who is the internet service provider to the property and what sort of internet speeds you are getting ?

Does the buffering occur during peak internet periods (try a internet speed test to check) ?

How far is the Router from where you access the internet and how many walls does the WiFi signal needs to pass ?

Also have a read of this guide article below (unfortunately with some of the suggestion you need access to the router).

http://help.nowtv.com/article/Buffering-All-devices

[Anonymous User]

Hello there Schnapps

Thanks very much for your response and I'll do my best to answer your questions:

4 of us, but only 2 of us have been in the house from the 25th, which is when I got back from my holiday, and is how long the problems have been happening.  I've had the box for 15 months with 4 people in the house (landlady goes away quite a lot) without any problems.

VirginMedia and don't know the speeds but as I said this problem has only just started occuring.  The landlady has been away since the 19th which is when I went away and all was working fine up until this date - the problems started occuring on the 25th (sorry if I'm repeating myself just trying to give the full picture).

I usually watch from the box about 9pm onwards.  Tonight I started from 7pm and have only just finished watching the last 3 episodes of Ray Donovan, phew - the last day to watch and I still had 3 episodes to go but I did it!  Same old buffering, loading and screen blackouts, and I forgot to mention I also got this screen several times:

"Oops there's been a problem.  We're trying to fix this.  Try again later or go to NOW TV Help - Error Code 1"

But I can't find anything here about this screenshot.

I'm in the room above, so I guess the ceiling?  I don't have any problems with the wifi for my laptop or my smart blu ray player and I've watched Netflix and Demand 5 no problem since I've been having this problem with the box.

With regard to the guide article, thanks very much, I'll have a quick look through (I'm not the world's best with technical problems) but I don't have access to the router until she comes back. Funnily enough she was going to give me access as she's away a lot and I said I doubt if I would need it, as we've never had a problem before and I've lived here with VM being our internet provider for 5 years.

Thanks so much for your help, it's much appreciated, and I can relax a bit now as I've got until 19th October to watch season 4 although I would like this sorted so I can watch other things and movies as well.

Can I ask should I upgrade to a black box?  Do you think this would help?  Or would I still have the same problems?

[schnapps]

@Anonymous User

When you get buffering next time then using your Laptop click on the internet speed checker tool linked below, just to see what sort of download speed that you are getting (nowtv recommend 2.5 Mbs or above using their service).

http://www.speedtest.net/

Also when his your Landlady due back from her holidays ?

I agree with @Anonymous User that you need to access your Landlady Router to carrying out a reboot reset inline with Andy-S previous instructions.

Should that not work you may have to look at possibly changing the WiFI channel settings or some switch settings on the Virgin Router (Don't worry about that for now, hopefully the Router reboot and the nowtv re setup procedure will improve things).

Whith regards to the newer nowtv black box then on paper with the improved powerful processor and better specification it should be faster navigating around the UI, however like the white box it needs a stable WiFi internet connection without dropouts to work properly without buffering.

However saying that, there are some fantastic deals from places like Amazon, Argos, Currys etc where you can take advantage of the included voucher pass in the box which you can apply to your existing nowtv username account. 

[Anonymous User]

Hello there Schnapps

thanks very much again for your help.

Well as I said I'm not very technicallty minded so I hope I've clicked on the right thing once I was in the Speed Checker.  By the way I clicked on Scan Now first and ended up downloading Auslogics Boostspeed 9?  but then I found a "test" button so I hope this is the info you need:

During the day, no tv on:

Ping 137ms  Download Speed 44.90mbps  Upload Speed 3.03mbps

I hope this is the right thing I'm looking at 

So at 10.15pm looking to watch the final episode of Outcast, I ran the same test:

19  28.55  2.96

Boostspeed said it was best to take 5 readings to get the mean result so:

23  28.99  3.11

20  30.61  3.08

20  36.96  3.08

27  33.52  3.14

I then ran a programme from Boostspeed which promised to opitmise the internet connection and after this:

25  36.05  2.99

I'm afraid this is all Greek to me and I thought it would be the download speed we would be looking at but those are in double figures and don't bear any relation to your 2.5 suggestion but the upload speed does?

Anyway, our landlady comes and goes so I've no idea when she'll get back, but I checked with one of my housemates today and she hasn't locked the door to her room so that we can have access to the router.  So tomorrow I'll check but I'm under strict instructions not to mess it up!

Once again, thanks for the help and advice about the black box, maybe something to think about when all this is sorted 

[schnapps]

@Anonymous User

Those internet download speeds look extremely good to me where you are getting on average around 30mbps which is more than ten times the minimum recommended by nowtv.

Before you carry out the rebooting procedure on the Router and undertaking the factory hard reset on your white nowtv box by following @Anonymous User instructions in his post.

I would suggest just try a forced software update on your white nowtv box by following this linked help guide below.

http://help.nowtv.com/article/Other-app-not-working-NOW-TV-Box