Android By Russell Holly Jun. 30, 2014 9:30 am
If you have a metered Internet connection and an Amazon Fire TV, you might want to make sure this little box isn’t eating through all of your data.
As streaming media boxes go, the Amazon Fire TV is right up there with the best of them. The UI is great, the voice controls are highly functional despite being limited to one or two apps so far, and the remote control just feels nice to hold. One of the killer apps that came with the Fire TV is Amazon’s ability to pre-load video files it thinks you want to watch, making it so that next video you press play on starts streaming instantly rather than taking a second or two to buffer and play.
This little feature is great when it works, because it makes the experience feel like you are watching local content. Unfortunately, instead of being really great at guessing what you are going to watch next, it looks like the Fire TV might just be gobbling a bunch of HD video, with little or no concern for how much data it is consuming in the process.
When Tyler Hayes noticed that he had somehow blown through his monthly allotment of data at an unprecedented rate, he began looking for the culprit on his home network. After searching all of the usual suspects, he started disconnecting his set top boxes in an effort to locate the problem. Hayes clearly documents on his blog the network activity before and after his Fire TV got the axe, and the result is a little startling.
This little streaming media box had managed to consume upwards of 700GB more than his average monthly consumption in the time it was connected to his network. On one day in June it maxed out at 79.61GB.* Amazon has offered to look into the issue on their end, but until it’s either resolved or Amazon offers a way to turn off this caching feature, the Fire TV in Tyler’s house will remain disconnected.
Amazon is not the first company to offer this sort of service, but they are one of the largest digital distributors of HD content on the Internet today. This exact issue was one of several concerns voiced when Sony first announced the ability to pre-install PS4 games the company thought their users would want to buy in order to decrease the wait time from purchase to play.
It’s possible that Amazon will find an issue and resolve it quickly, but until that happens it might be a good idea to keep an eye on your Fire TV’s activities.
More...
As streaming media boxes go, the Amazon Fire TV is right up there with the best of them. The UI is great, the voice controls are highly functional despite being limited to one or two apps so far, and the remote control just feels nice to hold. One of the killer apps that came with the Fire TV is Amazon’s ability to pre-load video files it thinks you want to watch, making it so that next video you press play on starts streaming instantly rather than taking a second or two to buffer and play.
This little feature is great when it works, because it makes the experience feel like you are watching local content. Unfortunately, instead of being really great at guessing what you are going to watch next, it looks like the Fire TV might just be gobbling a bunch of HD video, with little or no concern for how much data it is consuming in the process.
When Tyler Hayes noticed that he had somehow blown through his monthly allotment of data at an unprecedented rate, he began looking for the culprit on his home network. After searching all of the usual suspects, he started disconnecting his set top boxes in an effort to locate the problem. Hayes clearly documents on his blog the network activity before and after his Fire TV got the axe, and the result is a little startling.
This little streaming media box had managed to consume upwards of 700GB more than his average monthly consumption in the time it was connected to his network. On one day in June it maxed out at 79.61GB.* Amazon has offered to look into the issue on their end, but until it’s either resolved or Amazon offers a way to turn off this caching feature, the Fire TV in Tyler’s house will remain disconnected.
Amazon is not the first company to offer this sort of service, but they are one of the largest digital distributors of HD content on the Internet today. This exact issue was one of several concerns voiced when Sony first announced the ability to pre-install PS4 games the company thought their users would want to buy in order to decrease the wait time from purchase to play.
It’s possible that Amazon will find an issue and resolve it quickly, but until that happens it might be a good idea to keep an eye on your Fire TV’s activities.
More...
