[Joxer]

Anyone use this? I've rented a few from here because its cheaper than the rental store, rogers VOD, and especially xbox marketplace for new HD movies. This weekend I happened to have a sick child and so more need of movies.

Movie 1 downloaded starting around 5:30pm Friday, started playing with 5% done and played fine till the end.

Movie 2 downloaded starting around 7:30pm Friday, started playing with 5% done and had multiple issues with buffering (catching up to the download) and had to go watch something else for a while to let it catch up. Really annoying.

Movie 3 downloaded starting around 7:00pm Saturday. Finished at 11:30 Saturday, we didn't even try to watch as it took forever to get to 1% and it was estimating 5 hours to complete. Totally unacceptable.

All movies were HD, and about the same size. Is there a chance this is an issue with PSN being able to handle the load, or is Rogers deliberately throttling PSN downloads on their internet side to push their VOD services on the cable side? Interestingly enough, I had sent an email to complain that their VOD wasn't competitively priced, so maybe they just decided to throttle away their problem.

 

[Joxer]

The internet other than that was fine. Even though the PSN download was crawling, I could get 25mbps speedtest and ended up eventually watching some HD movies off of netflix on the xbox WHILE the psn download was still in progress. It may be that they ramp the throttling up as the overall load goes up on their network, but maybe they should just not sell these high bandwidth packages if they don't have the network to support it when push comes to shove.

I have found several reports of comcast throttling PSN traffic, and many resorting to using a proxy server on another computer in their home to bypass the issue and speed things up by 8 times. I certainly hope that for this kind of money they're not being that underhanded, but they already do it widely to bit torrent regardless of what it is you're going after.

 

[Joxer]

Xbox live marketplace is 50% more for the same content. Might as well drive to blockbuster at that pace. It seems to me that it is traffic shaping by Rogers - just like Comcast in the US has done.

 

[Joxer]

Also converting the MS points to dollars shows it is quite a bit more expensive...