Can DNS service affect video streaming speed?

Question

I am using a DNS service ( like unlocator.com) in order for me to watch Netflix.com because I am located outside US.

Recently, I found that Netflix ( and also Amazon Prime) videos are very slow and keep on buffering. However, whenever I do a speed test, the speed is always good ( ~5Mbps). Usually with this kind of speed, I can stream netflix videos well, no problem. But not recently.

I have no problem streaming Youtube videos, even HD ones.

I am trying to find out the real problem. My friend said the DNS service ( unlocator.com) can be the culprit. But I thought DNS service only takes care of the geographic checks and nothing else, and hence it shouldn't impact the video streaming quality.

Am I right?

Answer 1

You are right that DNS is just used to look up addresses, and I can see why you'd be confused as to why someone would suggest that different DNS services can slow down your actual transfer speeds.

DNS services like Unlocator.com are not just DNS services, they are for making you appear like you're in a different country so you can watch country-specific content, while not being in that country.

They do this by having custom DNS entries for certain sites (like say, Netflix.com) so that when you request those domain names they are redirected to a transparent proxy which makes you appear to Netflix like you're coming from wherever that proxy is located.

Since all the traffic is being sent through this additional proxy, this proxy can become congested, causing slowdowns in traffic between you and Netflix.

Answer 2

I was having issues with streaming quality for NHL.tv, even on a connected app built into an Xbox One S. Quality was horrible. This was highly unusual given the Xbox was connected directly to a powerful DD-WRT router and speedtest was showing 60mbps down and 6mbps up.

Troubleshooting at the NHL.com website suggested changing back to ISP's DNS servers, which I did. I was using OpenDNS servers. This solved the problem, I'm now back to high quality streaming.

Why? No idea.

Answer 3

No, DNS is not streaming any contents to you. All it does is translating a domain (http://xyz.com) into an IP-address (111.222.121.212). The IP-Address is then used by your computer to connect to the real server, which provides the content then. The only thing that could happen is that the DNS resolves your Domain directly to a server instant to a load balancer. When the the server allows the connection and many other people use the same DNS server and get to the same server the speed of the server itself could a problem. However you could test this case (It's properly not the problem) by setting a different DNS server (See here to see how to do it with Windows) to one that will mostly give you the correct IP (Google DNS as an example 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). If this works you should move to a other DNS service permanently.