Player device bandwidth usage

In general our systems do not require a great deal of internet bandwidth to operate. Most material is downloaded once to the player’s onboard memory cache and then played locally from there. Exceptions to this are some of our 3rd party integrations, such as YouTube and Vimeo and to a lesser degree the Web Page app, social feeds, etc. YouTube and Vimeo are streaming services and so due to their licensing requirements videos ran in that way will generate more traffic on your network than if you were to upload the video to us using the Video app. Test link

Below is a bandwidth usage test on a typical SmartSign2Go playlist which contains many pages of content (about 10 minutes long). Attached are two screen shots of that test. The first one is while the player is booting up and playing through the playlist for the first time (and while it is downloading all content to memory). The time scale for that graph is approximately 2-3 minutes.

This second photo (below) shows a graph of bandwidth usage once the player has played through the playlist one time and loaded all content into the cache. As you can see the scale on that second graph is in Kbps as opposed to Mbps in the first, so you can see that once the player gets to round two on the playlist there is very little traffic. Keep in mind also that the traffic results also are showing our computer’s communication with the router during the test, so what the player is responsible for is even less.

In order to ensure your player(s) use the least amount of bandwidth possible, double-check that you have set your “Playback settings” to “Repeat what has already been played…” This will tell the device to save content to its internal cache rather than always streaming. You’ll find this section in the Settings area of your account online.