No Signal at Live Video Startup Operator11
Operator11, a Hollywood-based live streaming startup (our coverage), has had repeated outages recently, as TechCrunch’s John Biggs complained this morning.
We contacted company president Jason Mitura, who attributed the outage to “growing pains.” A little reminder that web video is not an easy technical feat. His full explanation:
We had the perfect storm of technical meltdowns - the service was off line for about 48hrs.
When everything went down, we lost all access to our forums and email database thus couldn’t get anything out to our users in a timely manner. We’ve learned from the growing pains and are adding a level of redundancy on our key systems.
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This is a basic customer service issue, not even a technical one. This is the equivalent to going to the Apple store during open hours, it being dark, with no sign on the door.
Hopefully Op11 will come up with a way to notify people about their outages. It’s no excuse though.
drew olanoff on December 6th, 2007 at 2:43 pm - Permalink
I’m sure that the delays in this new field of offerings will be worked out of the systems in less than a year of the release. We all learned to ride a bike over several months , as a child , and it’s just a part of growing into your body. After a while , you don’t have so many scraped ellbows. They’ll get it going. Good luck to all of you trying to make it better for the rest of us.
coldhitz on December 6th, 2007 at 2:43 pm - Permalink
I thought Josh Harris owner and ran Operator11? plus there is no online presence of staff. Features have been broke for weeks with no replys or talk on the fourms.
Jerod Miceals on December 7th, 2007 at 9:15 am - Permalink
Jason Mitura adds via email:
“Since launching the alpha version of our software in May, we’ve grown to just over 13,000 registered users and deliver 3,000+ hours of video daily. We’re planning on moving out of testing, and launching the full version of our software by March. This is the first major interruption of our service that we’ve seen to date; and consequently, we found out where all the holes were in our system. When we were down it was scary because we had zero access to any of our systems. In regards to not notifying our users, there is no excuse. Lesson learned, and we value all the input we’ve received over the last couple days. Overall, our alpha phase has been very successful both in terms of the feedback we’re getting from users and in proving out our technology.
“As you know, delivering a very robust user experience is taxing on hardware and delivery systems - not to mention Flash Media Server desperately needs the update which it is soon getting. Some sites like Justin.tv and Mogulus have been using Amazon to go “serverless.” We’ve gotten a version of our site up on Amazon (and had it running in red5) but ran into serious performance issues with the live switching that is central to our app. Streaming a live video feed with chat is quite simple and there are an abundance of free services that are very stable at doing it at scale. What we’re trying to do is technically a lot more difficult and taxing on resources - pulling in feeds from all over the net, switching between them, and having the audio and video in sync when it comes out the other end.”
Liz Gannes on December 7th, 2007 at 10:40 am - Permalink
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