It’s one of the most important questions of our modern age, one that is vitally important to billions of the Earth’s inhabitants: how do you speed up streaming of videos and music from online services like Netflix, Stan, and similar sites?

There’s nothing more frustrating and annoying than having a video suddenly hang up in the middle of a great scene because it’s buffering due to slow speeds. Well, there’s not much you can do about the speeds you’re getting from your provider, but there are some steps you can take on your end to make your viewing or listening experience run a lot smoother.

Australian streaming speeds

Turns out, Aussie’s already enjoy some of the best streaming speeds in the world. According to Ookla, which operates the popular site speedtest.net, Australia ranks a solid fifth-best in the world for mean download speeds, and tenth for upload speeds. Of course, some telcos provide better service than others. But overall, the performance is pretty good.

While that’s good news, it doesn’t guarantee that you won’t still experience problems, and part of the problem is self-induced. You’re probably doing things, or not doing things, that slow down your streaming speeds.

Here are some ways that you can speed up streaming and ensure trouble-free service.

Tips for speeding up streaming speeds

• Shut down competing devices and apps. These days most households have a lot of devices competing for Internet connectivity in their homes, and they’re all doing something all the time. You probably have multiple smartphones, laptops, tablets, and desktops in use, and if you have a smart home, you can add in your TVs, refrigerator, oven, thermostat, and your bathroom scales. All of these things are eating up your bandwidth. If you want faster speeds, you have to decide what you need on and what you don’t.
• Turn off unnecessary programs and tabs. The device you’re streaming on needs to be cleaned up too. Shut down any open tabs you don’t need, as well as any programs like Steam or Skype and other browsers that you don’t require at the moment.
• Use a cable instead of Wi-Fi. Cables may seem old school and inconvenient, but the fact is an Ethernet cable provides much better performance than Wi-Fi. Serious gamers know this and prefer to be wired, and the same is true for serious streamers.
• Delete your temporary cache files. You should be doing this on a regular basis anyway. The performance gains can be significant. But if you haven’t done it in a while, or ever, go into your operating system or browser tools and learn how to do it. While you’re at it, go ahead and defragment your system. And start doing both at least once a week.
• Set your device to a lower screen resolution. You normally don’t need to be using the highest screen resolution when viewing videos. Just dropping down from say 1080 pixels to 720 can be a big improvement, and you’ll hardly notice the difference.
• Update your devices. Make sure you’re using the latest version of your browser, and if you’re using an app, make sure it’s up to date also.
• Disable hardware acceleration. This takes a little more technical savvy, but it isn’t hard. You can easily find out how to do it with a quick Google search. It may or may not help, but if your streaming problems are persistent, it’s worth a try.
• Download your files. If you download your videos and music to your device, you obviously don’t have to worry about streaming and buffering. Simple but effective. And of course, you won’t need an internet connection when you want to watch or listen to them.

If you’re experiencing problems, try these simple tips to speed up streaming. Chances are you’ll see an improvement.