Youtube Live TV Picture Quality

[squibber]

For those who have Youtube Live TV, does it seem the picture quality is not as good as previously?

The picture quality of sports broadcasts are particularly worse. Maybe signal quality suffers because the signal comes form one source and then is rebroadcast through the internet?

For those who have Hulu, Sling, FUBO, how is your picture quality?

[Sem]

I've had YouTube TV for about a year now so when you say "as good as previously," I'm not sure when you're referring to. I feel the picture quality is ok, certainly nothing great, and nowhere near the picture quality I remember from having Direct TV satellite service.

[squibber]

I think my problem might be my router. Maybe MightyGiants can chime in on this one. My friend suggested running the internet speed test. When I run it on the computer, the download speed is around 100 MBPS. When I ran the download speed test on my phone, I got 8 MBPS. I guess that's adequate speed but my Linksys router is over 5 years old easily. It's dual channel and the newer routers have more than that(plus have more coverage) so I'm leaning towards getting a new router.

As far as when I noticed the drop off, I'm not totally sure but the picture quality seemed OK in the spring. For a couple of months over the summer, we had AT&T streaming instead of Youtube TV because my son wanted the Yes network for Yankee games.

[Sem]

I'm not sure you'll see a night and day difference with a new router. I do know you're not likely to get the same speed test numbers on a phone as on a PC, regardless of which router you're using.  100Mbps download should be adequate enough to get all you're going to get out of YouTube TV, in my opinion. Hopefully you're not watching the games on your phone.

I just checked my numbers and got these:

100Mbps/12Mbps - Laptop with a wired connection to the router
50Mbps/11Mbps - Same laptop with a wireless connection to the router
25Mbps/8Mbps - iPhone 11 wireless connection to the router

[MightyGiants]

I think that you should look at other high-quality streaming sources and see how they look.  If other high-quality sources are allowed to stream, then your issue isn't your internet connection.   One thing to be mindful of is how many people in your home are streaming at once as everyone is sharing bandwidth.


If other high-quality sources are good, then I think you need to look at your YouTube settings


https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853835?hl=en#:~:text=Make%20sure%20you%20are%20using,sources%20routed%20to%20your%20encoder.

[MightyGiants]

This also might be the problem


https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/24/21192384/youtube-video-quality-reduced-hd-broadband-europe-streaming

[Sem]

This also might be the problem


https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/24/21192384/youtube-video-quality-reduced-hd-broadband-europe-streaming

I think that link is referring just to the YouTube video service, and not their YouTubeTV. Both are owned by Google, but they are two different products.

[squibber]

Problem solved! Our new better range and faster router arrived today. After my son installed it, the picture is now noticeably sharper. I don't get the occasional buffering on the TV either(picture freezing).