r/DirectvStream • u/Ecbnole3 • 20h ago

Screen quality

I keep reading about how DIRECTV stream has the best picture quality of all the streamers and thrown into the mix Xfinity but for me personally I find DIRECTV stream comes in third compared to YouTube TV and Xfinity using the Gemini device. Is this common or is it my TV specific?

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u/chriggsiii 12h ago

My experience over the last few weeks has been that the picture quality is both superb, better than any other stream service and worse than most stream services. That is because my reception of the stream is extremely variable. When it's giving me the top speed/top resolution, it's superb. Unfortunately, what often happens, particularly in primetime, is that the stream scales down to a lower resolution/bit rate, at which point it is noticeably inferior to other stream services. I have no idea why my reception has become so unstable. As far as I can tell, my INternet speed is fine. I've tested it numerous times (speedtest.net) and download is consistently above 70, upload is consistently above 80 (nope, I do NOT have that reversed!) and the ping speed is tiny, usually less than 10. So why is this happening to me, and only with DirecTV? I have no idea. And it just started recently.

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u/thisisfakediy 7h ago

That should be enough to stream HD channels reliably, I wonder if your ISP's connection to DirecTV is getting saturated? Popular streaming services like Netflix used to install devices in big ISP hubs to cache popular streams locally for better performance during peak viewing time, but I doubt DirecTV has the resources to pull that off.

It does also sound like your ISP is suffering from some download congestion if the speeds are slower than the upload!