Been having some odd issues with iSky recently.

I run Mac OS X Lion on a Macbook Air with latest Flash Player in Chrome to watch iSky. My internet speed is about 4-5mbit which is ample for iSky. We are on Slingshot's Unlimited plan.

Now, this is the weird part. If I watch iSky on my Macbook Air, it will sometimes skip quite badly. It's unpredictable, eg. in the first half of the Rugby last night, it was terrible, but then came right in the second half.

My first thoughts were about bandwidth. I did a speedtest from where I was and was able to achieve approx 4mbit, plenty for iSky. The problem is that iSky wasn't "using" the bandwidth it has available to it. iSky needs around 160kB/s to stream nicely. In a bad patch with lots of skipping, I checked my bandwidth monitor and see that the speed is varying between 120kB/s to 20kB/s; not enough to stream.

I figured hey, iSky is probably overloaded and can't serve an adequate amount of data. I got my flatmate to try his PC laptop and it streamed fine. At least, when he tried it. I was trying in parallel and it would barely load. I thought his laptop might have a better WiFi chip but I could still achieve 4mbit from my Macbook, so that can't be the problem.

I tried iSky with about 10 minutes to go in the Rugby and it actually streamed fine...

That means it could be something to do with the Mac OS Flash Player. I tried Safari at the time which had similar issues. Or, it could be iSky just being generally unpredictable and my flatmate got lucky.

Would love to hear any thoughts and theories...