stream restarting and ads slowing down

Tried watching an on demand title tonight (Mountain Men: Ultimate Marksmen).

The first couple of breaks for ads (3 or 5 ads) the video would slow down and be out of synch with the audio. I waited until I could hear the audio of the program again, then skipped back 30 seconds and content would resume in synch.

Then halfway through the program, a break of 7 ads started, again slow and out of synch, then the program restarted at the beginning. I fast forwarded to my last spot, had to suffer another block of 3 ads slow and out of synch, repeat the 30 second skip back and continued watching.

The third time the stream restarted, I was already frustrated. It finally got to the point that I was seeing endless, slow out of synch ads and could not get back to the program. I restarted the Direct Stream app. Ads would continue to pile up, slow and out of synch, and I could never get back to my last point in the program.

Being in IT, I could tell this is a coding issue - the ads do not have the same priority as the program and the buffer/scheduler loses memory of where the program continuation point was. If I could log into the DirecTV servers, I could probably fix it myself.

For reference, I'm on 100Gb cable internet using a Roku 3.0. I realize it's a model or two back, but that should not matter for a simple stream. No other devices were utilizing the internet bandwidth at the time.

Any others experienced this? Any resolution?
Why am I even having to see ads for an on demand service I'm paying for. Aren't part of my fees going to the content providers anyway so that I shouldn't have to suffer through ads?

Really frustrated with DirecTV and ready to go back to cable. :-(