To be fair, once the game started, it worked faultlessly. Although I did turn down the quality. I don't ever have a problem with anything else. I work from home and my connection never drops out.
I've got a ridiculously speedy Virgin Media connection, and ifollow still goes down once or twice a game. I used to think that it wasn't that bad, but then I realised that at £10 a pop that's the best part of forty quid a month over the season. It's considerably more expensive than Sky Sports (for far fewer games), and absolutely laughable in comparison. I suppose the club do say that they get some money (or most of it?), but then I wonder what ifollow's angle is. Do they get a flat fee? I've got no idea whether I'm paying the club for 'virtual entry' (which is fine) or ifollow for having bagged the rights (which is not).
I have exactly the same iFollow experience. Today I managed to watch rugby through an Amazon stream great quality throughout and no buffering. Ifollow ends up running about five minutes behind for each half because of the buffering and the picture quality is at best indifferent. I’ve got fibre running at around 65mb/s and expecting Styles to score any minute!
Getting a goal alert on my phone from BBC sport and only then realising that ifollow wanted me to press a button to get the stream back up to 'Live' was a personal highlight this season.
The worst is getting a goal update or an half time update from ifollow itself via a notification long before ifollow on the same app actually shows it
I just delete the BBC Sport app once the cricket season is over. But it's wild that you can pay a tenner for a 90 minute experience and it's still not the best option for keeping up to date.
Does anyone with the relevant tech knowledge have an idea as to what the iFollow problems could be caused by? It beats me. When it goes down it often affects plenty of people at the exact same time (e.g. plenty missed that QPR own goal) but seemingly not everyone. So it cannot be going down entirely. Would there be various servers that people connect to at random and certain servers go down, so affecting whoever was unlucky enough to be on that one? It affects various people at random when others have a perfectly fine stream, indicating it is at the user's end but we all have decent connections and don't get interruptions on other streaming services. Despite being down here in 'straya I cannot remember the last time YouTube or Netflix buffered. I've found that the browser itself affects whether I can get a stream with Firefox much more likely to work over Edge (despite usually being the other way around with these things due to the script and ad blocking style add-ons I have on Firefox). Or is it a global conspiracy with ISPs trying to stop us watching the Reds?
I imagine it just boils down to $hit hosting at their end. They will definitely be getting hammered on volume, but that's not our problem. They should be scaling their infrastructure to deal with it.
The BBC is one of the worst for getting updates on football games, notoriously more than 2-3 minutes behind reality, sometimes more. Even the "Soccer Saturday" vidiprinter is way behind, that's why I stopped watching ages ago (when we play away of course)
Its definitely not that simple. I dont usually have problems with iFollow but for the game on Saturday I kept getting screen freezes for a few seconds and the circing buffering symbol - I stopped it checked my speed and it was 18Mb download - its a bit down at the moment but works fine for streaming anything else and is more than enough for an iFollow stream. I watch BT sport and Sky sports via internet and a BT TV box and they work fine almost all the time - just an occasional drop out if there is a glitch and the router restarts but never the buffering you sometimes get on iFollow. I dont understand the technology they use but I suspect its not up to the job and sometimes gets overloaded I remember in the 2012 Olympics sometimes the BBC streams didnt work so well due to the huge numbers watching online - not seen any issues with BBC streams since so I suspect they upgraded their servers - I think iFollow probably dont have the capacity to stream to the sheer numbers watching on a Saturday afternoon and some people get an inferior service