5 Tips to Watching Movies online
You’ve got the superfast broadband connection and you’re ready to experience the
best in screen entertainment – now what?
Tip 1 Use a decent movie streaming service.
The six main services in Ireland (at the time of writing) are:
Amazon Prime Video
Disney+
Netflix
Now TV
Apple TV
Youtube
These are all paid-for services but the quality is excellent. YouTube do a great service
where you can rent a movie for a period of time, much like the oldies among us remember
renting a video tape- Imagine that! The other services are pay monthly and all of their
content is available to view with subscription. You can watch a few movies on free services
too, such as RTE Player, VirginMedia Player and 4OD. Some of these services allow you
to download content to a device which can then be viewed offline later- great if you’re on a
journey with kids or do not have unlimited data on you phone.
There are lots of other sites on the market at the moment and more launching all the time,
including a few dodgy ones. Make use of any free trials before committing to pay for any
service, to make sure it suits you.
Tip 2 Check if you have good internet speed and good Wifi before you start watching. If
you’ve a bigger than usual house the Wifi may not reach all areas of your home. Whizzy
Internet can help to solve this problem for you. If you are getting your Wireless Broadband,
Fibre Broadband or Siro Broadband through Whizzy Internet, you can check how much
bandwidth you are using at any time by logging in to your My Whizzy Page. Streaming
movies takes about 0.5GB of data per hour for standard definition which only requires
approx 1 Mbps average, 2.5GB per hour for full HD at approx 5Mbps average. 4K
requires 7.5GB of date per hour at an average speed of 15Mbps(according to Netflix).
Tip 3 If you’re on a lower Broadband speed or package make sure others in your home
are not using devices to stream video, play games or download games at the same time
that you are planning to watch your movie – this can interfere with the bandwidth coming
to your Smart TV or whatever you’re watching on.
Tip 4 If your house is like ours and others in Wexford, Wicklow or Carlow, with lots of
people coming in and out and being noisy, subtitles are a really useful feature when you
are streaming any movie and struggling to hear all the dialogue.
Tip 5 Set parental controls up so that your kids can only watch movies and programmes
that are age appropriate for them. All of the main streaming services offer these now and
they are incredibly easy to put in place.