Throughput speeds aren't always your main problem, intermittent packet loss, as well as periods of high latency can cause these issues with streaming services.
Personally, I use the following services to ping my connection constantly, the first pings a lot more frequently and will give you a graph of the last 24 hours to get an idea of whether your connection has been slow to respond or has stopped working for a short period, which you might not otherwise notice:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/monitors.html
Since they are based in the UK, I don't know if they will support US based IP addresses, apologies if they do not.
The second service just pings every minute or so and will tell you if your connection has been unresponsive, you can set up email alerts to let you know if that happens. In my case I ended up getting rid of Netflix because it was always stalling on my 30Mbps connection. It turned out my connection was dying intermittently, I had to get (on their 3rd visit) engineers from the ISP to replace ends on cables coming in to my property.
If you want to test the throughput of Netflix itself though (if they are using traffic shaping this cannot be tested with normal speed tests as they will not shape your speedtest traffic in the same way as Netflix traffic) you probably want to use something like:
http://thebestofnetflix.com/check-your-netflix-speed/
I can't say I have ever used it, but it's one of the top hits when I google "netflix test"
The youtube report is here: https://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/
– Jeff-Inventor ChromeOS – 2014-08-12T04:32:00.270There are plenty of ways to do this, but it would help if you explained what device you are using to stream Netflix / Hulu to. On some of the newer implementations of the Netflix app (the thing is on too many platforms to count at this point) you can get the network throughput statistics while you play your video. If you are on a computer, there are plenty of applications that will let you list the connection speed between all open TCP connections. But that probably will not help if you do not know what your throttled bandwidth was *before*, this could all be a mass placebo effect. – Andon M. Coleman – 2014-02-06T01:23:57.617
I am streaming from an Apple TV and it has been fine until recently. I am guessing the website hosts are not the same as the locations as the streaming video. And if I did know the IP addresses how would I measure the speed? I think Netflix will need to release a tool to do this properly. – Brennan Stehling – 2014-02-06T02:01:26.093