One of the common issues when watching web video is buffering, where the video plays, then stops and buffers, then plays some more.
While there can be multiple causes for this, more often than not these buffering issues are caused by the speed of the viewer’s Internet connection.
Enter SpeedBit Video Accelerator. It’s a new offering from SpeedBit that claims to make even HD videos stream smooth and uniterrupted, especially for people with slow Internet connection speeds.
SpeedBit Video Accelerator is a piece of software that you download and install (it’s available for Windows or Mac) and it automatically configures itself on your computer. Then, whenever you watch videos from over 150 popular video sites (like YouTube, Vimeo, ESPN, etc.), it intelligently “speeds up” the delivery of these videos, so you can watch without any buffering issues (it does this seemingly through a bit torrent approach of sorts).
So what’s the catch? Well, SpeedBit Video Accelerator isn’t free. It will cost you around $40 per year.
And while I’d love to be able to test this software myself and tell you if it’s the real deal or not, the problem is I already have a 20mps Internet connection, so I never run into any problems watching online videos, period.
But if you have a slower Internet connection and try SpeedBit Video Accelerator (they offer a free 15 day trial), please post your results here. I’m interested in your experience.
You can learn more about SpeedBit Video Accelerator and download the free trial by clicking here.
I can only dream of the day we get 20mps download here in the UK. On a good day I get just over 2mps and on a bad day (like today) just less the 1mps so watching videos isn’t fun!
I have satellite internet (Hughes) on a desktop and use Verizon moble on a laptop. Neither is any good for streaming video at home. The Verizon works in some cases and has an acceptable transfer limit (5MB/month). The Hughes is overpriced, has absolutely no customer service, and has a daily download limit of 168MB which makes it unusalbe for much video downloads. Any video I view is downloaded in Real Player and I am constantly watching the size of the file. Can the SpeedBit software help me with these downloads as long as I watch the file size?
@Tom – I couldn’t say whether it would work or not, but this is exactly what SpeedBit says their product is designed for.
@Steve – I’m in the UK and have a 24 meg connection with: http://www.bethere.co.uk. Most videos play seamlessly but in most cases I’m in the habit of downloading videos before I watch them anyway.
@Dave – If you really want to test it out, I’m sure you could find some bandwidth throttling software. I’ve done this in the past for clients that have needed to test how many web application users they can load onto a given connection or link. Some applications are quite neat in that they will drop a couple of packets, or change the latency etc. so you can really push an application like SpeedBit to its limits.
YES!! SpeedBit Video Accelerator works!!
I have a very slow (well slow to me) 2.6mbs connection and was complaining to my wife how slow to load your “United Breaks Guitars” embeded Youtube video was. After reading this article and installing the 15 day trial demo, I went back to your other article page (“When Social Media Is More Powerful Than SEO, Pay-Per-Click and All Other Forms of Marketing Combined”), I cleared my browser’s cache and clicked on the embeded Youtube video again. BAM!! It loaded like lightning. Youtube’s HD videos are also downloading very very fast now too.
Thank you very much for this tip and for writing these articles,
Very good journey and experience!