Sophie and Aileen decide to get together at Aileen's house so they can watch the show together. They can’t believe how the plot has taken an unexpected twist in the very first episode! It’s not what the club members predicted would happen based on the Season 1 finale.
Aileen checks her phone and sees it only has one bar, so she asks Sophie for her Wi-Fi password. Once Aileen gets on Sophie's Wi-Fi network, her streaming quality improves.
They text Antonio and Ryan throughout the show in excitement and awe.
Data Transmission
When you upload or download a photo or stream a video, the app you’re using is communicating with the internet to get the data that constitutes it. And the more data you consume, the more important the speed of your connection is. Video contains lots of information—enough to fill a screen full of pixels many times per second and supply audio to the speakers. Read to learn more about bandwidth.
The bandwidth of your internet connection measures the maximum amount of data you can receive in a fixed amount of time—in other words, how quickly you can receive data. It’s usually expressed in bits per second. If your bandwidth is high, you can view high quality, high resolution video with stereo sound.
If it’s low, you’ll notice a degradation in quality. Perhaps the audio will be reduced to mono, or the video resolution will be lower. And it’s likely that the video compression algorithm will be tuned to produce greater compression at the expense of quality—which you’ll experience as fuzziness, blocky, banded, or grainy areas, strange flickering, and other compression artifacts.
In the worst case, your app may pause the video to build a buffer—enough data to play for a few seconds to smooth over any hiccups in the connection.
The bandwidth of your internet connection determines how quickly you can receive data. Keep reading to learn more about bandwidth.
The internet is made up of lots of smaller networks connected together.
If you stream video over a cellular connection, your phone is connecting to a local cell network, which then connects to the internet, and eventually to the computer that’s streaming the video. The cellular network may have lower bandwidth than the rest of the internet, and the connection to your phone is especially vulnerable to reduced bandwidth if your cell signal is weak—usually one or two bars results in poor video. And of course, if you lose your cell signal completely, you won’t be connected to the internet at all, which means you’re out of luck if you’re not in range of a Wi-Fi network.
On the other hand, if you connect via Wi-Fi, you’re accessing the video stream via a Wi-Fi router, which typically has higher bandwidth, and a more direct connection to the rest of the internet.
That’s why streaming on Wi-Fi is typically a more pleasant experience. Technologies such as LTE and 5G are efforts to improve cellular network bandwidth.
Protocols
A large factor in the success of the internet is open protocols. A protocol is an agreed-upon set of rules that allows two devices to perform a common function.
The internet is built on protocols that handle the transfer of information from one computer to another. And because the protocols are open, meaning that anybody can write software to implement them, many different kinds of computers running many different kinds of software can still coordinate as a team to deliver a stream of video from a server, or a cell phone, or a wireless security camera, via connections as disparate as Wi-Fi, cellular, cable, telephone and cable networks, and others, to devices ranging from phones to laptops to desktops, all running different apps and operating systems.
All these many devices and systems speak the common language of basic internet protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP—and RTSP, which is one common protocol for streaming media.
