Online streaming is becoming more and more popular. What was once a novelty for the tech savvy several years ago has now become custom in almost every modern household.
It’s no surprise either. Quarterly reports are showing that the major cable companies are losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers every quarter. With this trend, more and more people are turning to the wide range of online streaming options that are out there. We wanted to know how well these online services performed, so we spent several days monitoring them with our Full Page Check monitor.
We monitored the services using a Full Page Check for seven full days, from May 20th, 2016 through May 26th, 2016. In that time frame the only service to drop below 100% uptime was Netflix, but they still had an uptime percentage of 99.90%. That translates to about 10 minutes of downtime for their 81 million subscribers.
How did the performance do?
We monitored each website’s home page with a Full Page Check to verify load speeds and uptime. So who was the fastest?
Amazon Prime was the fastest site, loading in just over 2 seconds, closely followed by Starz and Vudu. It is difficult to get exact subscriber numbers for Starz and other networks, as the data is split between people who use the service online and people who just watch on the premium cable channel. The big three online streaming sites, however, are each catering to millions of people:
| Website | Subscribers | Performance |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Prime | 54 million | 2.44 seconds |
| Netflix | 81 million | 4.53 seconds |
| Hulu Plus | 9 million | 5.37 seconds |
We’ve written before about how Netflix prepares and ships its terabytes of content to their customers, cutting download speeds by keeping popular content cached in their CDN. Hulu and Amazon each have similar procedures to ensure the best quality. From the performance numbers Amazon Prime appears to work best for the number of subscribers their serving. Netflix has longer load speeds, but they are able to cut down on those by caching popular content close to where it will be streamed.
What services are you subscribed to? Have they performed as well as you’d like, or have you noticed long delays? If you’re interested in monitoring your own website for performance, our Full Page Check could be exactly what you need. You can start today with our 30 day free trial!
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