• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

I Like Kill Nerds

The blog of Australian Front End / Aurelia Javascript Developer & brewing aficionado Dwayne Charrington // Aurelia.io Core Team member.

  • Home
  • Aurelia 2
  • Aurelia 1
  • About
  • Aurelia 2 Consulting/Freelance Work

Stan (the not quite Netflix competitor) Is Horrible

Opinion · April 21, 2016

Shame on you Stan, shame on you Australia.

In the video streaming wars you have the king sitting on the iron throne: Netflix and then you have everyone else fighting for their chance to sit on the throne.

In Australia we have Netflix, we have Presto, we have Foxtel, Foxtel Go and we have Stan. I have been a subscriber to Netflix since it launched, I tried Presto and found it to be too expensive, Foxtel is a relic of the past and Stan is somewhere in between.

I have been trialling Stan for the last 3 months now and it is personally very disappointing. What appealed to me about it was the fact they exclusively had the latest season of Better Call Saul. But what is the point of having an exclusive if it is barely watchable?

The problem with Stan is buffering. While my connection is not the greatest, I sync at 18mb and save for local area congestion, it is fine for most things. Even if you have a strong connection, in my experience Stan will still buffer. Buffering is unavoidable with Stan.

Buffering on all VOD services is expected given the sad state of Australia’s internet infrastructure at the moment. However, I am able to watch Netflix fine. I get the occasional loading screen, but in most cases I see buffering on Netflix because of congestion or someone in the house is using up the bandwidth.

To kick Stan further while it is down, I watch Netflix via a US VPN to get access to a bigger catalogue of content and it still buffers less than Stan does. How is this possible? How is it my traffic can be funneled through to a server in another country and back, but still work better than Stan?

And then to top it all off, when Stan buffers it just freezes. There is no loading indicator that appears like you see on Netflix. Your TV show or movie just freezes. The first time this happened, I actually thought my Fetch box froze up, so I reset it.

The freezing is one thing, but when it freezes, it doesn’t even always resume from where it froze, but rather just skips. I regularly watch a TV show or movie and see it pause to buffer, then it starts playing from an entirely new scene and I am left to wonder what the heck just happened in those lost skipped seconds.

It seems everyone who uses Stan encounters the buffering issue at some stage. For an Australian company you would think they would optimise their network traffic for Australian viewers, less network roundtrips should mean there is no latency to stream. I think Stan needs to fire their network administrators or the company handling their streaming traffic.

The problems with buffering are one thing, but then there is the lack of loading/progress indicator when buffering comes into play. Whatever you are watching will just freeze and resume once enough has loaded.

Dwayne

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Keith
Keith
2 months ago

Totally agree. Have used Netflix for a long time with no problem. Trying Stan for new content but this constant buffering is tiresome. I won’t be signing up for this garbage.

0

Primary Sidebar

Popular

  • I Joined Truth Social Using a VPN and Editing Some HTML to Bypass the Phone Verification
  • Testing Event Listeners In Jest (Without Using A Library)
  • How To Get The Hash of A File In Node.js
  • Thoughts on the Flipper Zero
  • Waiting for an Element to Exist With JavaScript
  • How To Paginate An Array In Javascript
  • How To Mock uuid In Jest
  • How To Decompile And Compile Android APK's On A Mac Using Apktool
  • How To Get Last 4 Digits of A Credit Card Number in Javascript
  • Wild Natural Deodorant Review

Recent Comments

  • CJ on Microsoft Modern Wireless Headset Review
  • Dwayne on Microsoft Modern Wireless Headset Review
  • CJ on Microsoft Modern Wireless Headset Review
  • john on Microsoft Modern Wireless Headset Review
  • Dwayne on Why You Should Be Using globalThis Instead of Window In Your Javascript Code

Copyright © 2023 · Dwayne Charrington · Log in

wpDiscuz