What your connection actually needs to hold, not just reach
The number your ISP advertises and the number a stream actually gets in practice are frequently different things. What matters for smooth playback is sustained throughput — held steady for the length of what you're watching — not a one-time speed-test peak.
Speed needed, by resolution
| Resolution | Sustained speed needed |
|---|---|
| Standard definition | 3 Mbps or more |
| HD (1080p) | Roughly 5–10 Mbps |
| 4K (Ultra HD) | 25 Mbps or more |
Treat these as a floor — exact demand shifts with compression and content type.
Testing it in a way that actually means something
Running a speed test at noon on a quiet network tells you almost nothing about 8pm with the whole household online. Test it on the actual device you stream on, at the actual hour you watch — a number pulled from a phone next to the router doesn't reflect what the TV in the other room is getting.
Advertised vs. actual
An ISP sells a ceiling, not a guarantee. Evening congestion, a router several years old, and distance from the access point can each cut a meaningful chunk off whatever the plan technically promises.
What quietly competes for the same connection
- A second device streaming, downloading, or on a video call at the same time
- An aging router straining under more simultaneous connections than it was built for
- Wi-Fi signal loss from walls, distance, or a neighbor's overlapping network
- Background app updates or cloud backups quietly running elsewhere in the house
What a struggling connection actually looks like
Most decent player apps don't just freeze outright — they quietly step down to a lower resolution or pause for a few seconds to rebuild the buffer. That's the app compensating for a connection that can't keep up, not evidence of a broken login or a server-side problem.
Telling a bandwidth issue apart from a login issue
Both look the same from the couch: "it's just not working." The distinction that actually matters is whether a channel loads at all and then struggles (bandwidth) versus nothing loading from the start (login). The Setup Guide covers fixing the second kind.
Confirming it before paying for months
The 24-hour trial runs on your own network for a dollar, which settles the bandwidth question directly instead of guessing from a speed-test number alone.
Related questions
Does a more frequently updated catalog need more bandwidth?
No — how often the catalog changes has nothing to do with bandwidth. What matters is the resolution of whatever you're actively watching, same as any streaming source.
My speed test looks fine but playback still stutters — why?
A single clean result can hide short drops that only happen intermittently, or a neighbor's router crowding the same wireless channel. Re-run the test right when the stutter is actually happening, not hours later.