I fired up TVants a few weeks ago and have been absolutely loving seeing Star Ray again. I missed all the amazing programming that I used to be able to watch when I was in Toronto. Star Ray is truly unique.

However the past few days I haven't been able to connect to the TVants servers. I was curious if it is something on my end or if the servers are down.

Thank you in advance for any assistance!

P.S. Happy Birthday to baby Shadow!

I realize that you are a fan, but you got cut off for wasting our bandwidth. On multiple occasions you had the connection to TVants open for six hours or more. StarRay on TVants on average consumes 1.5 gigabits per hour per user. It costs us 3 to 5 cents per gigabit depending on the time of day to run TVants. You have paid nothing. It's not personal, we cut off other users we deemed bandwidth wasters (leechers) at the same time we cut you off. If you gave a donation to pay for your bandwidth like some other users it would be a different story.

You appear to be in our coverage area, why don't you just watch StarRay off the air? Our transmitter doesn't care how much bandwidth you are using and the picture is much higher quality.

Hey Jasper,

Understandable, I donated 30$ a few weeks back via Paypal, but I’ll gladly offset the bandwidth usage with regular donations. The last thing I want is to be a drain on the amazing service you guys provide.

In terms of coverage area, I’m in St. Catharines, a little bit closer to the Falls area. I’ll definitely try rigging up an antenna if that will reach? I honestly assumed it was too far away, which is why I went with TVants.

Regardless I’ll be glad to keep donating to help keep Star Ray running strong, and even volunteer work if there’s things remotely that I can do.

Hi Paul,

I checked and you did donate $30. The block on your IP has been removed.

Star Ray TV runs 7 Internet servers running various services. These servers are under constant attack by hackers with us suffering about 50,000 attacks a day. I personally spend up to two hours a day banning new hackers trying to bring our systems down. At the present time we are banning 11,409 IP ranges worldwide and there are still more hackers every day. It’s quite frustrating. I’m quite sure most of the TVants users we recently banned are hackers. The Internet has become one big sewer.

I’m sorry that you got cut off, but you are the only one that cared about getting cut off and contacted the station.

We do have viewers in Niagara Falls but I don’t recall any viewers right in St. Catharines. If the CRTC wasn’t such a corrupt organization we’d be available on your local cable system. With all our enemies, it’s a miracle that this station is even on the air.

Hey Jan,

Thank you so much. I read your interviews and I can see how much you have stacked against you. Star Ray is truly the only channel I’ve watched that is real TV, I believe that wholeheartedly. It’s a shame what the CRTC has let TV become here.

I’ll be sending a big donation on Friday. Also if you need help with anything volunteer wise, I can call the station this week, I’d love to help out.

Hi Paul,

I just seen the large donation you made through Paypal. Thank-you very much!

Hello,

I have also received similar issues to TV Ants not connecting at times, and after a few tries, I realized why. I've had both my IP in Orillia blocked as well as TV Ants blocking my connection at my mother's place in Scarborough. I've watched a lot of the station off and on for about 2-3 years.

I have made my first donation of $30, as I've wanted to contribute to the station for quite some time but couldn't decide how much monthly I should allocate to donations, since I am on a fixed income.

Hopefully this should offset some things, but if not, let me know.

Your IP was observed constantly connecting and disconnecting for a number of hours and was disrupting other TVants users. It looks like your connection to our server has bandwidth issues. Are you on a DSL Internet connection?

TVants is a shared system; your computer has to upload the stream to the next user. Users with bandwidth problems can create a "black hole." Please note: "We reserve the right to disconnect and ban anyone that is affecting the stability of our TVants server."

I removed the ban on your IP but it could happen again if we observe more of the same disruptions.

I did see your $30 donation which I appreciate very much. Thank-you.

I'm not sure, it's a Bell Internet set-up, and the reason for the on and off connections was because the stream was having issues during a movie and I was trying to disconnect and reconnect, since the buffering bar would sit in between 40% and 70% some of the time and the stream would freeze.

So far it's been working again.

I did a lookup on your IP, you definitely have a DSL setup. Your connection was having issues NOT our stream. In the future if you are running into similar problems, please discontinue watching and try again later. Connecting and disconnecting will only make the bandwidth dropout worse and subject you to a ban.

DSL runs on existing copper cable that could be 50 plus years old. Bandwidth dropouts are common. The Internet was not designed to run a continuous stream like video.

TVants has buildt in error correction which normally works quite well but the correction will not work when you have constant and prolonged dropouts.