This can be an intermittent problem with the otherwise excellent Rumble video platform – sometimes videos don’t play right away when you click on them, and/or buffer every few seconds when streaming.

Let’s run through some quick solutions to this problem:

If the video won’t play right away, then try just waiting 10-20 seconds or refreshing the page. If the video keeps buffering, then lowering the video quality can help it stream more smoothly.

The refresh option is obvious – just click the circular arrow refresh/reload button wherever it is on your browser or app to reload the page. Similarly, the Rumble service can sometimes take a few seconds to load, so if you just give the video a few seconds to play once you’ve clicked the play icon, sometimes if loads fine.

Try Adjusting the Video Quality

If the video does play, but keeps buffering, you can try reducing the quality/resolution of the video so the bandwidth requirements to play it are less. This can be especially useful if you’re watching on a free VPN connection that may have limited bandwidth to begin with. Also, Rumble videos don’t seem yet to auto-adjust resolution to the available speeds as other platforms do, so manually changing video quality can really help.

To adjust video quality, click on the Settings cog in the bottom right corner of videos, and adjust the video resolution down as low as possible.

Bottom right corner – settings symbol – lower down to 360p or 240p for smoother streaming

This has helped me a couple of times stream videos that were not playing before. 720p is HD and will use the most data; 480p is SD and uses less, but can still struggle to play on weak connections. 240p is usually the lowest, and has more chance of streaming when bandwidth is low.

An added bonus is that even when video quality is reduced, I don’t notice it nearly as much on Rumble as on other platforms – the videos still look pretty good to me even in 360p or 240p, and in any event, most people are watching videos for information and aren’t even bothered about the resolution.

Another thing to try is to move closer to your router if on a Wi-Fi connection, since it may be a poor signal that’s causing bandwidth to be low and videos to buffer.

Try Alternative Platforms

Videos buffering on alternative video platforms is irritating – a lot of users are also finding Bitchute videos either do not play for viewers, or do not upload properly for content creators. But we need to put this into context with what’s happening right now.

YouTube and other mainstream content sharing platforms have been aggressively purging users who are publishing content they ideologically disagree with, and the speed at which this has been happening has taken most people by surprise, including alternative platforms.

All of a sudden, you have millions of people trying to switch over to alternative platforms (Telegram and Gab for social media, plus Rumble, BitChute and others for video sites), and the alternative platforms have struggled to keep up with demands as servers have been overloaded.

Remember, it took the big tech sites like YouTube years to build up their server infrastructure and network capacity, and the alternative sites are trying to catch up in a matter of months, so complaints about slow streaming and uploads on other sites are unfortunately common right now.

They’ll catch up in time, but there will be some short term pain. The good news is that once the transition is complete, we’ll have platforms that fully respect free speech and differing values, and we can largely discard the old “mainstream” platforms that have shown a total disregard for free speech and healthy debate on certain topics.

Let’s look at some alternative platforms for uploading and streaming videos, together with some quick pros and cons, both for streamers and publishers:

BitChute – Possibly the most popular alternative platform right now, but common problems with account holders not being able to upload videos (stuck on processing screen). Also problems with videos buffering for some users, though sometimes they play fine as well – very mixed story. Right now, I’d use Rumble for uploading (videos are embeddable as well), but this may change over time as servers improve.

lbry.tv – Reliable platform for streaming and uploading, but just doesn’t quick have the popularity of Rumble or BitChute just yet. A slightly lesser known alternative video platform.

Dailymotion – Fast, reliable, servers for streaming and uploading – videos will always play – but a very mainstream style platform, so stay away if covering anything controversial, as they are likely to censor as the big players have. Fine for fun or leisure stuff.

Vimeo – Reliable servers, so videos will always play, but have censored certain content creators before, so can’t be trusted if you’re covering political or other controversial topics. Fine for leisure or non political/conspiracy stuff.

Bottom Line – Rumble is still my personal favorite right now, especially for reliable uploads, and the buffering problems can usually be resolved by turning down video quality. They also have a strong pro free speech policy unlike the big tech Silicon Valley players.

See our full article on the different alternative to video sites to YouTube that allow embedding of videos, for more information on your different options here.