This website, and all pages within this website, and all videos, tape recordings, podcasts, and other materials including photographic images and captions, offer, disseminate, convey and represent our opinions, hunches, suspicions, best recollections and editorial views.
If you're in North America and listening to the VIDEO podcasts on our own servers, you shouldn't ever have a problem with speeds or reliability.
BUT --
If you are listening from other parts of the world, especially non-western societies, you may VERY WELL experience slow streaming and other problems, including even page timeouts (404 errors).
Why?
Because the Internet links between the USA and many other regions is sucky in the extreme. It barely works, and even when it does work, it's designed mostly for text-type transfers and other tiny files.
We format our videos to stream as quickly as possible, but even then, some networks simply can't serve them up in a timely manner.
When you request a file on the Internet, that file might reside on a server that's near to you, geographically, and that request is routed through a few pieces of equipment along that route. Those are called "hops". Even a few "bad" hops might not affect you all that much. But add up a LOT of bad hops, and you can get to the point where you can't even get the files you want.
Here's a really fast route:
1 146.97.33.6 2.150 ms 2.159 ms 2.133 ms
2 146.97.33.61 1.580 ms 1.543 ms 1.552 ms
3 146.97.35.170 1.544 ms 1.535 ms 1.526 ms
OR--
You might live in a tiny country that doesn't know anything about Internet and doesn't care, like this (a traceroute from SE Asia to the USA, where our servers are located):
Tracing route to stockphotosworldwide.com [64.90.35.157]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.259.153
2 289 ms 357 ms 335 ms 10.91.65.141
3 309 ms 310 ms 352 ms 112.198.249.13
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 469 ms 425 ms 496 ms tky-b2-link.ip.twelve99.net [62.115.182.112]
7 554 ms 418 ms 497 ms tky-b3-link.ip.twelve99.net [62.115.126.135]
8 588 ms 636 ms 558 ms port-b3-link.ip.twelve99.net [62.115.127.10]
9 571 ms 609 ms 539 ms rcntelecom-ic-337495.ip.twelve99-cust.net [62.115.33.125]
10 593 ms 665 ms 551 ms 216.243.61.40
11 616 ms 601 ms 594 ms pdx1-cr-1.sd.secretsquirrel.com [66.33.300.5]
12 508 ms 570 ms 620 ms pdx1-a5u56-acc.sd.secretsquirrel.com [66.33.200.13]
13 552 ms 565 ms 579 ms apache2-rank.billyboy.secretsquirrel.com [64.90.35.162]Trace complete.
This is because of physical distance (number of hops), but also due to crappy equipment along the route (quality of hops).
This is why accessing our podcasts can be slow if you're far from the USA, and especially in a crappy area.
Ironically, lowly Cambodia is generally known for great Internet, while Bangkok is known for garbage.
We're sorry for the aggravation.
But there is less than nothing we can do about it.