“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.”

Hopefully Op11 will come up with a way to notify people about their outages. It’s no excuse though.