Ah.  I found it was fine in browser (Chrome) and in the ipad/iphone app.  It was casting that was the spanner in the works.

Just received:

 

Update following first weekend of Spark Sport and Formula One

 

Spark Sport delivered a solid performance over the first weekend of sporting events, with no outages to the service. The vast majority of customers streamed the Australian Grand Prix successfully. A very small number of customers experienced some minor issues with playback on some devices: the Spark Sport team is looking at these issues with a view to improving the viewing experience for these customers.

 

Since launch on Thursday morning, over 9,000 customers have already subscribed to Spark Sport, taking advantage of the 30 day free trial of the service that is available in March. Customer feedback on the platform has been very positive at launch, with many praising the clarity of the video stream and ease of use of the app. Naturally for a new service, the Spark Sport customer service team were hard at work over the weekend, helping customers to troubleshoot app set up and working through a range of questions. The large majority of queries were successfully resolved.

 

The Spark Sport technical team is now working on the next beta version of the app, and is looking to include additional features to improve the experience of watching Spark Sport. This includes merging the Formula 1 ‘pre-race’ and ‘race’ coverage into one programme rather than two to make it easier for customers to roll seamlessly into the race, and adding signage where required within programming (e.g. ‘end of programme’ or ‘advertising break’) to improve the viewing experience.

 

Just put a feature request in for pre-created bookmarks in the stream; i.e. if they merge pre-race and race together and I join in late having a bookmark for the start of the race segment saves me having to try and work out when the race starts in the stream if I don't have time to watch the pre-race.  I'd imagine as Spark must know in advance the run program for Sky they can put these in the stream on the fly at set points?

No, mine was kinda generic at this stage... Pre-race/race but yes the grid walk is generally something I try to avoid missing.

I'm really curious to know how the VOD will work with the morning race, as Bahrain is a good test.  I shall do as I normally do and get up at 5 or 6 and start to watch it... hopefully I won't get a stream crash, but if I do I hope I can rejoin and not have to wait up to 4 hours.

First up, I'd like to say well done to Spark Sports - a very decent start and I'm very happy to have been able to watch the F1 in a far more convenient way than when it was on Sky. I tend not to watch the races live, which means I was previously stuck to watching it on my main house TV where the sky box is located. For this race, I watched some of the practice and pre-race build-up on my iPad, cast some of the race to the TV in my home gym while I exercised and watched the rest on my laptop and main living room TV. Very happy with the quality throughout, too and I've got a pretty weak ADSL (7-8Mbps) connection.

I had a couple of issues with the stream jumping back to the start or apparently randomly forward when I was "resuming", but nothing that phased me too much.

My only feedback is that I'd like better options for skipping backwards and forwards in set increments. Hopefully that's something that can come in an App update fairly soon? With the raw feeds, the ability to hop forward or backwards 15 seconds, 1 minute, 3 minutes, for example, would make the dead-air advert breaks easier to manage and, let's face it, allow us to skip over any other bits of programming we're not interested in watching.

Looking forward to the next race (and to lots of other quality sport, too)!

smidon:

Ah.  I found it was fine in browser (Chrome) and in the ipad/iphone app.  It was casting that was the spanner in the works.

tdgeek:

smidon:

Ah.  I found it was fine in browser (Chrome) and in the ipad/iphone app.  It was casting that was the spanner in the works.

How far from your wifi router was the iPad as that was fine. And how far was the chromecast?

smidon:

The problem is in the way the app casts. I’ve googled this and a few years back this was common when chromecasts came out. Since then the various apps (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) have worked on their apps to make/allow the Chromecast to be controlled by the app.

Not at all the case.

When you cast from the app, it tells the chromecast "Hey Chromecast, play this stream"

the only exception here is casting from the browser, currently this will cast your browser (mirror) itself rather than pass the content.

That feature is being worked on.

I can't help but think 

My kids are at me: "I can't get email, Netflix won't work" etc. etc.  You can never tell if it's a local or network problem.  Often it's the latter.  Sometimes it's local/DHCP or similar issues and things need to be rebooted.

And

 

I'm Spark and moderate/acceptable quality devices end to end.  I am not going to spend a fortune on my house electronics, but we have Fibre, Spark Huawei modem, a hub and Cat06 through the house, relatively (but not absolutely) modern PCs, iPads, phones, a couple of Apple Airport Extremes, etc.  And a brand new ChromeCast Ultra bought especially for this.  I would like a better wifi experience but don't know what to buy, and anyway the ethernet is pretty stable and fast (75-90 mbps).

May be beneficial for you to start a thread and engage some input into diagnosing any potential double-nat or routing issues among the wireless and wired devices. Especially if they have the same SSIDs and threshold settings but different IP ranges between.

That may/can be a factor in losing remote control to wired devices. Not so much on wireless connected cast devices on the same AP...

hio77:

smidon:

The problem is in the way the app casts. I’ve googled this and a few years back this was common when chromecasts came out. Since then the various apps (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) have worked on their apps to make/allow the Chromecast to be controlled by the app.

Not at all the case.

 

When you cast from the app, it tells the chromecast "Hey Chromecast, play this stream"

 

the only exception here is casting from the browser, currently this will cast your browser (mirror) itself rather than pass the content.

That feature is being worked on.

Oblivian:

I can't help but think 

My kids are at me: "I can't get email, Netflix won't work" etc. etc.  You can never tell if it's a local or network problem.  Often it's the latter.  Sometimes it's local/DHCP or similar issues and things need to be rebooted.

And

I'm Spark and moderate/acceptable quality devices end to end.  I am not going to spend a fortune on my house electronics, but we have Fibre, Spark Huawei modem, a hub and Cat06 through the house, relatively (but not absolutely) modern PCs, iPads, phones, a couple of Apple Airport Extremes, etc.  And a brand new ChromeCast Ultra bought especially for this.  I would like a better wifi experience but don't know what to buy, and anyway the ethernet is pretty stable and fast (75-90 mbps).

 

May be beneficial for you to start a thread and engage some input into diagnosing any potential double-nat or routing issues among the wireless and wired devices. Especially if they have the same SSIDs and threshold settings but different IP ranges between.

That may/can be a factor in losing remote control to wired devices. Not so much on wireless connected cast devices on the same AP...

Been watching a bit and the quality is A LOT better than I expected. While it doesn't match the bitrate of skysport "HD" as I can see compression,artifacting, the 50FPS (or 60 i cant tell) is great :)

It plays back really well on chrome browser. no issues.

When I cast to CC ultra (connected via ethernet) via IOS app everything works fine until I want to pause/scrub forward/backwards STOP etc. The app loses control of the CC and I have to restart the google home app and spark app. 

Im thinking this is just typical IOS issue. sleeping the app while its in the background and when I wake it its lost link with CC.   Restarting apps all the time probably isn't going to cut with someone that just want to watch sports 😢 Also chromecast isnt the most relibale of hardware .   Would an additional bluetooth connection to control the casting device improve playback control?

I have this also while casting  with my motoGP subscription. constant app restarts .

Everything is fine if you just let the video playback.

100/20 spark fibre 

hio77:

 

the only exception here is casting from the browser, currently this will cast your browser (mirror) itself rather than pass the content.

 

That feature is being worked on.

 

That feature has been in place since mid 2017 (beta early 2017). If you cast a browser tab, and then use the full screen icon on the video,Chrome will offer you to 'optimise' the stream. When you select this the Chromecast will take over the screen, and the browser tab will have a Chromecast icon. Obviously it only works on content that the Chromecast can handle - most noticeably (hello Sky Go) it won't work on Flash content.

smidon:

tdgeek:

smidon:

 

Ah.  I found it was fine in browser (Chrome) and in the ipad/iphone app.  It was casting that was the spanner in the works.

 

How far from your wifi router was the iPad as that was fine. And how far was the chromecast?

As close as you can get. The TV’s on the wall with the Spark/Huawei modem/router literally right underneath it on a cabinet. The chromecast is Ethernet wired into a LAN port in the router, and I’m sitting on a couch a few feet away with the iPad/iPhone on 5g wifi.

The problem is in the way the app casts. I’ve googled this and a few years back this was common when chromecasts came out. Since then the various apps (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) have worked on their apps to make/allow the Chromecast to be controlled by the app.

I’ve put feedback into Spark and in email this afternoon they say they are aware of it and working on it (over “coming weeks”).

What Hio77 said. The reason I asked, is that when you access it on the iPad, as I could do right now, for me the iPad is recieving SS from my wifi router, 4 meters away, could be a lot further too. When I cast it, the iPad is not now involved, the player that received SS is the Chromecast, sitting .3 of a metre from my wifi router. The CC is a teeny PC that can only do one thing, play the app to the HDMI TV input

From all the testing I have done internally and now, casting the app from the iPads (I have two) or iPhone, is the best solution. Its rock solid. There is no PC, CPU, RAM, browser, cables and so on, its virtually direct.

Apple Airplay for example isnt great. It works, its ok-ish. That requires my laptop (or iPad) to be receiving SS over wifi, AND sending it to my wifi router. It shows. the CC is just recieving SS and its already in the HDMI port