ESPN 3 video Quality very poor

Well, since you failed to give us any details about your equipment, we can't help you. The only thing I can say is that it works perfectly for me, almost broadcast quality.

Part of it could be the speed of your internet service, the other part of the puzzle is on ESPN's end. Yes, ESPN live streaming sucks... along with Netflix, Amazon, and others. Internet streaming has a long way to go and much has to do with the poor web infrastructure in the U.S. That's why Google and Verizon are starting from the ground up with their fiber optic networks and services. However, they'll never re-wire the whole country without some major partnerships and other infusions of capital.

Yes, part of the reason could have been a tax on ESPN's servers. But as an above poster said, your internet speed plays a huge role in the quality. You didn't mention how fast it is, but you need at least a solid 5mbps connection to get HD.

EPSN3 is very dependent on bandwidth. For most part, I'm usually at four to five bars. If I tried four games, it drops to one or two. Part of it could be EPSN, but that's not likely considering they've been doing this a few years and probably have pretty good predictors for how much people will be trying to use the service.

I wish ESPN let you pick your quality like NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB. It may be my internet flutuates widely, but I find I can support higher speeds than the auto seems to pick.

ESPN3 does have a nice picture when you get five bars. It's HD, but not nearly as crisp/sharp as broadcast. They probably can't support, reliably, that kind of bit rate.

the numbers are good. You may be right about ESPN's servers, but I just don't think it's likely. Have you experience it with other events?

Those numbers seem good, but there are a variety of factors that could be your problem. How long can your connection sustain those speeds? If you have a weak cable signal, or DSL, those speeds won't hold for very long. Also are there any other devices connected to the network at the same time?

I did some video and a picture during the tonight's Fiesta Bowl. I got mainly 5 bars during the game. Part of it was four. I did get as low as two; I just reloaded the window and it went back to five.

click the pic for a larger version and you can easily see five bars.

start of video is five bars, and around the middle drops to four.

I don't picture the demand for the Rose Bowl being that much greater than the Fiesta Bowl during prime time hours. Thus, I still think it's either your ISP, PC, or your LAN.

Ok well that picture and video means nothing to us. The picture is too far away from the set, and the video is lower quality than the actual broadcast, so we can't tell anything from it.

Lately I haven't had great results either. I've been using ESPN3 with AT&T for years. The past few months it seems like it doesn't do a good job of detecting the speed available. Reloading it usually fixes it.

I don't know what the heck happened, but I had a link that went to flickr for the really large pick. Here's the link: very large pic

The video was shot in 1080p on my cellphone. I guess it took Youtube to add the 1080p video. Mainly, I was just ttying to give visual proof that I was getting four and five bars during the Fiesta Bowl, which probably had similar demands on the EPSN3 servers. I believe the OP is mistaken where the problem lies on his EPSN3 issue.

Yeah, it's really hard to say what the actual problem is; there are too many factors at play. I personally was only getting 2-3 bars off of ESPN3 last night, but Comcast has its own stream of ESPN, and it played back just as good as the HD broadcast. I wouldn't doubt with the popularity of the bowl games that just too many people were watching.

I have noticed that the quality of the video feed on the Free WATCHESPN is very poor compared to the live ESPN and ESPN2 feeds that you can get by logging into your Comcast account. I used watch to ESPN3 online a lot and now I find it pretty much unwatchable due to the inconsistent quality.

It has nothing to do with my internet connection speed. All the other streaming sites look fine, it's only WATCHESPN that is so poor. So either they are just not devoting sufficient server resources to keep up with the demand for streaming or they are intentionally making the free streams poor to push people to buy cable subscriptions. It seems to me that this started happening around the time they started "locking out" live feeds unless you have the subscription. So more than likely this is another gift to the scumbag cable industry who want stop people from "cutting the cord"....

I totally agree with this. I was watching tntovertime.com this Thursday and noticed that their feed is much smoother and higher quality.

I do this as well with my comcast account. Their stream seems to be a straight feed from ESPN, bypassing any of their servers or whatever that will slow it down. The only downside to this is they only offer ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU.

if anyone is going to crap the feed on WatchESPN it will be the cable company since EPSN makes the cable company pay for the service. You cannot go to ESPN and subscribe to WatchESPN, ie either your ISP has it or not. On a side note, in the UK, you can subscribe to ESPN Player, but it's limited to certain sports such as college sports or hockey. Thus, it doesn't do anything for EPSN to give crappy feeds.

I still don't like I can't pick the bit rate feed for ESPN. Ninety five percent of the time, I can support the highest feeds on all the other sports packages I get. I find the autodetect usually is really conservative on my HTPC. On my smartphone, it's really aggressive.

By the way, the WatchESPN app is really good when it works, and really bad when it's not. It's the goofest app I've encountered. I'm on Android. My friends with iOS has the same issues. I'll get a "video expired" error watching a live game, but I can hear the audio; I get a black screen. But it I'm using the HDMI out on my smartphone or tablet, mirroring, it'll keep the video on the TV, but the Android device will have that video expired message. Some of my friends have ESPN, and that feed on the app works a little better. I think it may have something to do with bandwidth drops.