How come....

[Mw Roofline]

... When using my ipad or iPhone in the house, on a full wifi signal I still sometimes get videos 'buffering' or things loading slowly, even despite a small ipad screen and a tiny iPhone screen

But I can watch a HD movie on my Samsung smart tv with no buffering through Netflix on a massive screen and the picture quality is perfect?

Does the tv use some mad kind of compression or something?

 

[SimonH2]

Is the TV wired or WiFi ?
Are you in the middle of nowhere, or are there other WiFi users around ?
Are both TV and iThings using the same service ?

WiFi is a shared medium - if other people are using the same channel then you'll have to share, and the sharing isn't "fair" as in there is no controller making sure everyone gets a fair slice. So it's possible that when your neighbour loads a large web page, or downloads a cute cat video from Youtube, your WiFi throughput suffers.
I read a story a couple of years ago about some researchers that had workied out that in some densely populated areas, 90% of available WiFi throughput was being spent on "non data" traffic - the overhead of all the different access points negotiating between themselves as to who gets to use the channel when - and leaving just 10% left to transfer user data. Given that 802.11g only has something like 54Mbps available to start with, that would mean something like 5Mbps shared between many different users !

The TV probably also has a larger memory buffer - so when the data is good it can store up more of it to ride through any dips. And I'd imagine that Netflix have put some work into making the stream adapt to the available data rate - possibly dynamically switching between compression ratios to suit the throughput it's achieving at any time.

 

[Mw Roofline]

Wifi tv. Some interesting info there thanks very much.