Years ago I had the free version of Hulu that came with ads (it used to have the free ad tier, and the paid-for-no-ads tier). Hulu did the dynamically scaling resolution to match your connection thing, which was mostly good for me since I didn’t have great internet and I’ll take smooth playing 720p over constant buffering. I don’t know if the ads scaled or were naturally at a reasonably low resolution, but I never had a problem with them playing through
One day though, something changed. Suddenly ads were coming in only in the highest resolution supported by Hulu at the time. Thanks to my terribly slow internet, this meant horrible buffering. Combined with ads being louder than programs, a 30 second ad turned into a multi-minute experience of a few frames at a time screeching at me before buffering again.
No matter how fast your connection is, a 30s ad takes half a minute to play.
The frustrating thing is that when I do see ads, the ad itself plays in higher resolution, and plays more smoothly than the video I’m trying to watch.
Different CDN with better allocation of resource and location than the CDN for the content you’re watching.
Makes sense, the ad people are the real customers vs your attention the product.
Years ago I had the free version of Hulu that came with ads (it used to have the free ad tier, and the paid-for-no-ads tier). Hulu did the dynamically scaling resolution to match your connection thing, which was mostly good for me since I didn’t have great internet and I’ll take smooth playing 720p over constant buffering. I don’t know if the ads scaled or were naturally at a reasonably low resolution, but I never had a problem with them playing through
One day though, something changed. Suddenly ads were coming in only in the highest resolution supported by Hulu at the time. Thanks to my terribly slow internet, this meant horrible buffering. Combined with ads being louder than programs, a 30 second ad turned into a multi-minute experience of a few frames at a time screeching at me before buffering again.
I didn’t keep Hulu long after that.