When the picture keeps stopping, in plain English
A calm checklist for the evening the telly will not behave, written in the order we actually work through it with customers rather than the order that sounds impressive.
It is rarely the speed you pay for
A stream needs far less of your connection than people imagine, and a household with a comfortable broadband package has plenty spare. If the number on your bill were the problem, the picture would fail all the time rather than only in the evening or only on one channel.
What matters more than speed is steadiness. A connection that quietly drops packets for a second at a time will ruin a stream while still passing every speed test you throw at it, because a speed test measures how much arrives and not whether it arrived in an orderly fashion.
Start with the walk between your router and the telly
This is where most problems live. Wi-Fi passing through two brick walls, a mirror and a kitchen full of appliances arrives in worse shape than it left, and a television sitting in the corner furthest from the router has the worst of it.
If your router offers two Wi-Fi names, one of them will be the faster short range band. Put the telly on that one. Better still, if the router is anywhere near the living room, run a cable. It is an unglamorous fix and it solves more evenings than everything else on this list put together.
Then look at the little box itself
Streaming sticks are small computers with very little room to breathe. They fill up, they get warm behind a wall-mounted television, and they slow down as a result. Clearing the app cache and restarting the stick genuinely helps, and it costs nothing to try.
If it only misbehaves after an hour or so of watching, suspect heat rather than the internet. Getting the stick out from behind the screen, using the little extension cable that came in the box, is often the whole fix.
Check whether it is one channel or all of them
This one question saves everybody a great deal of time. If everything stutters, it is your network or your device. If one channel stutters while the rest are perfect, it is that channel, and there is nothing you can do at your end.
Send us the channel name when that happens. We can look at it properly, and telling us is more useful than trying every setting on the telly.
Try it somewhere else in the house
Play the same channel on your phone using mobile data instead of Wi-Fi. If it is smooth on the phone and rough on the telly, you have proved the subscription is fine and the problem is in your home network.
That is not a fix, but it is the most useful thing you can tell us in a message, and it means we skip straight past a dozen questions we would otherwise have to ask.
The short version to keep by the telly
Restart the stick or box. Move it onto the faster Wi-Fi band, or plug it in with a cable. Clear the app cache. Check whether it is one channel or everything. Test the same channel on your phone using mobile data.
If you have done all five and it is still stopping, message us with what you found and which device you are on. You will have done most of the diagnosis for us already.
Did that not do it?
Tell us what you are watching on and what the screen is doing, and a person will work through the rest with you. You do not need to know the right words for any of it.
Message a person