I bought a Panasonic plasma HDTV in December 2008. It was cutting edge at the time, 1080p. The picture is still good except the lowest 3" of screen is black. This hides subtitles and closed captioning.
Yesterday, I received my new Amazon Fire 4K UHD “Omni Series” smart TV. It has a very nice, clear picture. But there is a problem.
Our DSL internet service is very slow. At best, download speed is 3 Mbps. Sometimes, it’s half that. (Not to mention the problem with intermittent failure which I described in an earlier post.)
When I watched CBS News, the picture literally stopped to buffer every 30 seconds. That was intolerable. However, when we watched the news over YouTube, the picture didn’t stop to buffer though it did lose definition from time to time.
DH asked whether there is any way to tell “Alexa” or program the 4K TV to drop back to old-style HDTV resolution instead of buffering.
We only just set up the TV an hour ago so I don’t know yet whether other video will be affected the same way.
Wendy
“When I watched CBS News, the picture literally stopped to buffer every 30 seconds. That was intolerable. However, when we watched the news over YouTube, the picture didn’t stop to buffer though it did lose definition from time to time.”
As someone who recently moved away from DSL, I feel your pain. We started with 1.5 Mbps and somehow managed to get 3 Mbps our of Verizon before we left. One thing that we noticed is that some streaming apps are great at monitoring bandwidth (Netflix is the best, Youtube, Roku, and Amazon Prime Video as well). Others are not so great. CBS was the worst as my wife likes watching Young Sheldon and it was a nightmare on DSL.
I don’t have a Fire TV to test it on, but if that setting exists, it would likely be in the Settings/Preferences → Network. I would look for Video Quality or anything related to Bandwidth. If there’s nothing there, you might just need to use Youtube unfortunately.
Phaz
When I watched CBS News, the picture literally stopped to buffer every 30 seconds. That was intolerable. However, when we watched the news over YouTube, the picture didn’t stop to buffer though it did lose definition from time to time.
I would say the CBS News feed is being delivered from a different source (CBS News web site) “on demand” to Centurylink and is not being sent to you from a local cache stored on Centurylink servers. YouTube might have local caches of popular shows (Netflix does this), so it is probably already on Centurylink. They do not have to wait to receive it from YouTube and then forward the signal to you to watch.
I had 12 mbps business class dsl for a while ($60/mo). The internet at my house was horrible. There was always lag. I had AT&T as a provider. I checked with my neighbors and they all had Suddenlink now Optimum I believe. We went with the 400 mbps plan for $79. It was a huge improvement over the dsl. I won’t ever use DSL agains. We run 3 tv’s at the house when the kids come. There is no lag and the phones all are screaming fast on the wifi. I did buy a Cisco modem instead of renting one from Suddenlink. HTH…doc
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