Intermittent Picture Quality on Streambox

I had this last night - the ticker on Sky News and Sky Sports News show it clearly as well of course looking at the actual picture.

I checked the diagnostics which were fine, as were the Sky Sports UHD channels, so I don't think it was a local signal issue.

All seems well on the little I've looked at today.

Sorry, I don't have the Stream box, however I do have a  couple of 360 boxes which run on the Horizon system which is the same one that Stream boxes run on.   

I don't know if this will work with the Stream boxes but people with 360 boxes that have had a slight stuttering issue have been able to solve it by pressing pause for a couple of seconds.

I'm on stream boxes, have two, one wired anf one over WiFi and can confirm that at certain times this juddery effect happens more frequently of late. I think issues started a few weeks back, just when the football season began. I know VM had an outage of sorts on the Friday night with many customers losing their TV service. 

Since the rebooting of their servers it seems to me that this juddering has affected channels when there is more users watching. Hence why Sky sports in particular has been affected. In my opinion it's a server issue, one where it cannot handle the amount of users connected and it struggling to maintain the frame rate, it's like very slight buffering and it's unable to pump out the required bandwidth to all those connected. As the last poster said wait until the picture is smooth, pause the stream for a second or two, then un-pause and watch it without going back to live. 

There are two causes of jerky behavious for streams.

1. The channel change (not a bug)
When you tune to a channel, the box requests a low-bitrate segment first to start playback quickly (known as adaptive bitrate streaming or ABR). It will take a few seconds for the ABR to ramp up to HD/UHD during which the video might look blocky or slightly jerky but it's perfectly normal behaviour.

2. The subsequent jerkiness (a network issue)
The Stream box uses ABR which adjusts video quality based on available bandwidth. If WiFi fluctuates the box may drop to a lower bitrate, switch frame rates (e.g. from 50fps to 25fps), skip frames or rebuffer. As a first step always use an Ethernet cable for connection. If this doesn't fix the problem, then it's caused by something else such as congestion on the coaxial side of an optical node.

Ive posted about this OP and im having exactly the same issues, all started with that friday night football and now its most noticeable on the sports channels and the fact other folk are now reporting this, is seems to confirm its at Virgins end.

Hi jifster 

Sorry to hear you have been having intermittent picture quality issues with your stream box. We can understand your concern, and we want to do our best to help from here. To best look into this, we are sending you a private message. Please keep an eye out for an envelope at the top right corner of your Forum page. Let me know if you have any issues locating this. 
Thanks,