ActionTiles "Media Tile" data usage. Check your refresh rate!

General Discussion
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Only been using ST with ActionTiles for a few weeks and over the past couple of days I got emails from my ISP that I had exceeded my download cap of 1.2TB/month. The only thing I’ve added to my network has been the ST hub, a few devices and of course ActionTiles on 2 tablets (wall mounted) for control.

I installed an app on my phone, called NetLive, and when Chrome was displaying ActionTiles, it was drawing about 3Mbps…that’s A LOT of data. So having 2 tablets doing this 24/7, my data cap was hit within 2 weeks.

I did however get lucky, the first tile I removed was the wunderground radar map image I was using. Data usage instantly dropped to almost nothing. Took a look at the media tile settings and immediatly saw the problem…the refresh rate was set to 5 seconds!!! When I set it up I had assumed it was in minutes. Now that it’s at a reasonalbe refresh time, my data usage is back to normal. Who knew a tiny weather radar image could suck so much data!!!

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Thanks for the heads-up, Lee!

Our company has to pay for bandwidth utilization, so, believe me, we’re pretty darn careful that the app isn’t doing anything excessive.

Media Tiles, however, pull or stream data directly from whatever source is specified in the URL. That bypasses us and is completely up to the Customer to manage. If you use a LAN source (common for video cameras) … not a big deal; but obviously need to be extra careful on your mobile device over the internet with limited broadband plans.

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Oh, I wasn’t putting the blame on ActionTiles, though it was where I noticed the excessive usage. this wasn’t even mobile data, this was my home cable ISP that has the cap.

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