5 Ways to Improve the Quality of Your Streaming Video

These days, thanks to the internet and content distributors, it has become very easy to access all sorts of video content from different sources. It is easy to access movies, TV shows, documentaries, instructional videos and almost anything else that you can imagine.

The only limit that you may sometimes have is the internet speed and capacity with which you can access the content. This can be an annoying problem unless you have an endless supply of patience to watch a streaming video that is constantly freezing because it is buffering.

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Short of paying for a better and higher capacity internet bandwidth, there are a few things that you could do to improve the streaming quality of videos that you watch online. It will be best to try these solutions before going for more drastic measures.

The two main areas that you should first focus are to look for an issue with the internet connectivity within your home and to find out if your computer is the source of the problem.

Use a wired connection to the internet

Connecting to the internet through a wired connection will ensure that you are not experiencing any unexpected latencies in the signal or loss in bandwidth and this could improve your streaming quality almost immediately as opposed to a wireless connection.

Check the strength of your Wi-Fi signal

If you are using a Wi-Fi connection, you should check to see that the strength of the Wi-Fi signal is strong enough. Go right next to the source of the Wi-Fi and see if there is any difference in the quality of the streaming content.

Turn off other devices using the internet connection

At times, the problem could simply be that you have too many devices (mobile phones, tablets, laptops or other computers) competing for the same internet bandwidth and this could mean that the video that you are streaming is compromised.

If you want to ensure that the problem is not from competing devices, turn off the Wi-Fi connection or switch off all devices using the internet connection apart from the device you are streaming from and see if it makes a difference.

Contact your internet service provider

The problem sometimes could be from your ISP. To make sure that this isn’t the problem, ask the provider to run a diagnosis or to tell you if it has been experiencing any technical issues. Sometimes, the ISP could be throttling your bandwidth because you may have exceeded your data capacity for the month and you will have to wait for the next month or pay for a higher data cap.

Investigate your computer

One of the first things that you should do before paying for any new subscriptions, is to find out if your computer is the source of the problem. To do so, the main problem areas that you need to investigate include:

• Find out if your Memory and CPU power are running at a normal capacity. If they are running at 100% or close to 100%, that may be the source of the problem. Close all programs, or get rid of any computer viruses.
• Clear your browser cache and increase the size of the browser cache if it is too small.
• If you are running an old computer, the hardware that you may have, may not be powerful enough to stream videos. Find out if the graphics unit you are using is powerful enough or not.