My game plan for being as cost efficient as I can with my streaming activity, is to have the Video Data Extender engaged most of the time. Please correct me if I am not understanding its function fully, but since I am not so concerned with the quality of the video as I am the subject matter, I am hoping to conserve my allotted monthly GBs at the expense of video quality. Am I actually slowing and conserving data usage this way?
Thanks for asking about this topic. Its pretty complicated and somewhat depends on the area of the country you are in, your plan speed, and the device you use to stream video among other things. As per Should I enable Video Data Extender?, the biggest complaints of videos buffering seem to come from customers of lower speed plans. If you are experiencing buffering/stopping of your videos or if the quality is too low, I suggest turning off Video Data Extender and closely monitoring your consumption via the MyViasat app.
In your case @rs_cook (because you and I have messaged one-on-one about it), I know that you notice very little performance or speed impact when you run out of priority data. I believe this is because you are in an area with fewer subscribers so your non-priority data is not being slowed by lots of other subscribers’ priority data. And therefore also you may not care how much priority data you consume. In your case, I strongly recommend turning off VDE for a month and seeing how it goes in terms of 1) reducing the incidence of videos buffering/stopping, 2) video quality improvement, 3) priority data consumption rate, and then 4) speed issues or other application problems caused by slow speeds while you are in the state of having used all your priority data.
Does all that make sense?
Thank you. Your explanation makes sense. I’ll keep an eye on things and let you know what of any significant findings.