Today we're making a major update to our video player. It's an invisible change that should impact remote streaming tremendously.

The updated video player now works incredibly better on high latency networks and does a better job at buffering video ahead of time.

Latency oh latency

So what does all of this mean? Previously, Channels had trouble streaming on high latency networks. Think bad hotel wifi, streaming from another country, or a bad cellular connection.

In these scenarios, Channels just would not stream well. It was spinner city. With this update, it will handle even the slowest of networks.

We've rebuilt the streaming portion of the video player from the ground up to handle slow and latent networks so that it keeps streaming through any blips or bloops.

Buffering...

With the old video player, Channels did not try to fetch a lot of video ahead of time while streaming remotely. This meant that if you decided to seek ahead, it would have to start the transcoding session all over again on your computer at the new position.

Now, it fetches more video ahead of time. After watching a little bit, when you go to seek, you'll find that it seeks right to the spot you were hoping to get to.

Never quit improving

We've worked super hard and spent a lot of time reengineering this implementation from scratch to make remote streaming as robust and reliable as possible.

We want to ensure streaming your recordings and live TV from anywhere is as great as possible.

We hope this improves your experience and helps to solidify Channels as the best way to experience live TV.