Sometimes, a page or video may seem to take longer than normal to load. Here are some tips to help troubleshoot what may be contributing to a slower load time.

1. Check your internet connection speed. You can check your overall internet speed here: https://fast.com/. If you do not have enough speed, you may need to increase your package with your internet service provider.

2. Are you on a Wi-Fi network that is shared with other devices and users? You may run into buffering issues if you don’t have enough bandwidth for everyone’s devices to be on the Wi-Fi network. If you are on a public network, bandwidth may be an issue. Please try again when you are on your home or office network.

3. Are you simultaneously streaming other videos or music? Are you downloading or uploading large files? These concurrent activities can contribute to latency issues. Please try closing other streaming services and wait for large downloads or uploads to complete and try again.

4. If you're on your home Wi-Fi network, and steps 1-3 are not an issue, you may need to upgrade your modem or router. Please check with your internet service provider to ensure your equipment is updated.

5. If you're using a mobile device and not connected to Wi-Fi, and you're experiencing slow loading time or buffering, you may have reached your data cap. This information is typically found under your device Settings, under Network & Internet Data usage.

6. Do you live in a remote area and is this the first time you've visited the site or tried viewing the content in question? It's possible that due to the nature of CDNs, the content has yet to be cached, causing some buffering or lag in load time. The remedy for this is to try to view the content again later, and the content should then be cached.

7. Viewers in India or Australia may experience some slower load times due to our CDNs being a bit slower to update in those areas. We are working on getting those CDNs to be a lot more reliable in the near future.

Update: As of March 2020, the internet has experienced above-average strain across the world, due to more folks using the internet to stream videos, video chat, and perform other resource-heavy activities on the internet.

Here are some articles that review this impact on worldwide internet usage, in case you are curious: CNBC, NY Times, another by NY Times, Bloomberg, and Fortune.

Right now, there really are no peak times of internet usage as it's pretty constant. This means there is more demand on internet networks, and you can experience a lag in your internet experience as result.

There's not much we can do to help speed up this process, but we do recommend you double-check our recommendations above.

How Video Data Travels to Your Device

When you click play on a Uscreen video, we send the video data out through CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), to distribute the content to you as quickly as possible. Due to recent increases in internet usage around the world, some CDNs may experience congestion.

The CDNs work to send the video data to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) via the most efficient path possible. Sometimes, exceptional circumstances mean we may need to use a less direct path.

When your ISP receives your video from Uscreen, your ISP will carry out the important task of carrying the video data across their network and into your home/device. If there is not enough capacity (e.g. your internet speed and upload Mbps), your video streaming quality will suffer. This is standard ISP behavior.

Additional Notes

The embedded video player on iOS devices and Safari will always buffer three video segments before starting playback, which some may consider being 'slow'. These three segments have a duration of 2 seconds (roughly the minimum feasible) per segment which gives a minimum latency of around 6 seconds without taking into account the time taken to ingest, transcode, package, and deliver the media segments.