For the last 2 years LRR has been using Revver to serve all our videos. There servers have been pretty fast, their player is customizable and they automatically transcode into both quicktime and flash. The ad revenue they have provided has enabled us to do many things we would not have been able to otherwise, such as purchasing the bus for the San Diego Road Trip and upgrading our equipment. It has also helped with the rent for the LRR Orbiting Underground Moon Base (rocket fuel, alone, costs a pretty penny, let me tell you).
Unfortunately, for the past several months, Revver’s quality of service has been very problematic. Extremely slow trans-coding resulted in many late video updates and often video uploads were truncated or corrupted, requiring multiple retries. On top of this, revenue generated by Revver and the quality of ads they are providing has been steadily declining and they have not issued a payout to creators since September. The final straw was when all Revver videos suddenly stopped working for a large group of our viewers using Time-Warner for their ISP. Now here we are, two weeks later, the situation still hasn’t been fixed and we are stuck apologizing for something that we have no control over. Not Cool.
This is all a lead up to tell you that we have now switched over to Blip.tv for our video hosting! Not only are the videos now higher quality, but Blip’s interface allows us to upload much faster, so hopefully there will be less late updates. At the moment, only the latest videos have been moved over, but we will hopefully be migrating everything over in the coming weeks.
As a side note, in response to this problem with Revver, I have changed the LRR backend to de-couple us from any video host. What this means is that if Blip doesn’t work for us for whatever reason, we can easily change to someone else.
As always, please let me know if you experience any weirdness or issues with the new player.
I’m assuming this means that you won’t be getting the ad revenue that you got from Revver (although apparently you weren’t getting that either)? Perhaps the Season Four DVD came just at the right time, I for one welcome our new Blip.TV overlords.
Comment by Emperor Gum — November 10, 2008 @ 4:12 pm
Is this an opportunity to reupload the older videos?
Comment by Lyinginbedmon — November 10, 2008 @ 4:24 pm
During the transition to Blip.tv, can you try and find the time up upload all the early videos – I don’t have quicktime, and so can’t watch anything more than a few years old 🙁
Comment by RodeoClown — November 10, 2008 @ 4:30 pm
Blip.tv also has advertising. In fact, they seem to use the same system as Revver.
Comment by Paul — November 10, 2008 @ 4:56 pm
The player seems faster, and it’s widescreen. I like it already.
Comment by Tim — November 10, 2008 @ 4:59 pm
I like the new video host a lot. The player looks sleek and I’m really liking the higher resolution. I have one question regarding video playback on Blip.tv. If I watch the weekly episode on the Blip.tv site, will that contribute to the site counter and ad revenue?
Comment by The Goose — November 10, 2008 @ 5:08 pm
As long as the RSS feed works (and it seems to), I’m happy.
Whatever it takes LRR, keep it up!
Comment by the_amativeness — November 10, 2008 @ 5:57 pm
@The Goose: It will contribute to ad revenue but not to views on the site.
Comment by Paul — November 10, 2008 @ 6:34 pm
I know you guys don’t want to hear this, and there’s very little you can probably do, revver used to work perfectly. The Blip.tv player takes over 60 seconds to load for me now, and once it does, the video doesn’t play smoothly – it keeps stopping and buffering.
Thankfully, the quicktime link seems to work alright.
Keep up the good work guys, and good luck getting these video hosting issues sorted out.
Comment by Kristopf — November 10, 2008 @ 7:42 pm
Ooh, can you put the video itself in the feed (rather than just a link to the site to watch it)?
You’ll still get the advertising revenue from the video, right?
Comment by RodeoClown — November 10, 2008 @ 8:22 pm
Thanks for the switch Paul. I hope that Blip.TV works out for y’all. It has worked for PurePwnage well enough so there should be some solace in that.
Comment by TheAshigaru — November 10, 2008 @ 8:24 pm
@RodeoClown: The videos are enclosed in the feed, just like they have always been. I just tested it in iTunes and the Blip.tv videos seem to download the same as the Revver ones.
Comment by Paul — November 10, 2008 @ 8:48 pm
thank you thank you thank you thank you guys so much!!! i can watch LRR vids again!!! YES!!! again, many thousands of thank yous!!!
Comment by bradleyrains — November 10, 2008 @ 10:11 pm
@Paul, I read it in Google Reader and I can download the file if I want, but what I meant was having the embed code in the post (or perhaps have a separate feed with videos embedded via HTML, rather than as an enclosure).
Not a big issue at all (I just click through to the page and watch it there), I just like being able to do everything in the one browser tab 🙂
Comment by RodeoClown — November 10, 2008 @ 10:37 pm
Yeah, i’m having the same loading issues with blip.tv. Now my computer has never been able to load videos very fast in the first place, but this seems significantly slower.
Also, I don’t know if this is just me, but I can’t move the time/progress bar to certain scenes or parts of the video. It’s not a huge deal, but I used stick the thing at the beginning and let it buffer, but now it’s not letting me do that.
Anywhoo, hopefully things work out with the new host. Better to have some minor inconvenience on my part instead of having so many issues on your side.
Comment by Fuzzyfreaker — November 10, 2008 @ 10:56 pm
Hey guys
I see many of my favourite sites moving to Blip. For me personally this makes watching movies a real pain.
I do not know why but I have seen movies stop loading in the middle of playing without they would ever continue. So I have to reload, and watch the whole movie again…
As for my first try with LRR with the Bonus Video “RapStar 64K” the Video stopped right after the Loading Time Intro… yay. 🙁
I understand your arguments about Rever… so I would not recommend going back… but I still hope there’s another way than this Blip s..stuff.
Comment by zico — November 11, 2008 @ 6:34 am
Hey guys,
I’m from Australia (in case that matters), and the loading time (not Loading Time) is horribly longer than Revver was. I understand the troubles you had with them, but this is really annoying.
I’m wondering if there are any settings you can change to smooth out the loading.
With Revver, I could hit Play, then pause the video after the rotating thing disappeared, then leave it to load. Now, I have to hit Play, wait until the video starts, and hit pause while the video is running – Mildly inconvenient!
Good luck with Blip.tv, Paul,
From Dan
Comment by Zeophlite — November 11, 2008 @ 9:01 am
I seem to be experiencing wierdness. The fullscreen doesn’t work for Opera, and the the download wouldn’t work in Quicktime or Front Row. Any advice of possible fixes if it is my settings that are messed up?
Comment by mosespippy — November 11, 2008 @ 9:57 am
The quality of the ads seem a bit better for me in the UK anyway and if your going to have adds at least have decent ones (DVLA “who done it” ad), also the speed and quality seem higher to me.
Comment by Corncob — November 11, 2008 @ 10:03 am
Hey guys,
I saw some of you were having loading issues. @Kristopf, @Fuzzyfreaker, @Zico, @Zeophlite, @mosespippy, and anyone else that is having problems, can you e-mail me at [email protected] with your IP’s (if you feel comfortable)?
We’d like to figure out what’s causing the loading issues and get it fixed ASAP.
All the best,
Aaron
—
Aaron Sonnenberg
Content Development Associate
blip.tv
Comment by [email protected] — November 11, 2008 @ 11:16 am
Thanks for helping out with this, Aaron. Hands-on work from you guys is always appreciated!
Comment by Tim — November 11, 2008 @ 8:17 pm
Paul,
We’re leaving as well. Blip’s player is mighty fine. I’m not sure if they offer the same solution to get your feed into iTunes though. That was one of my favorite Revver features.
Comment by Ryan — November 12, 2008 @ 10:18 am
Hey Ryan,
We do offer syndication to iTunes in our dashboard. Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions: [email protected].
We’re working on the loading time issue – thanks to those who have e-mailed me.
Best,
Aaron
Comment by [email protected] — November 12, 2008 @ 12:38 pm
@Ryan – We actually manage our own feed through feedburner. This allows us a little more flexibility in presentation and organization. Also, it allows us to integrate videos hosted on Blip.tv, Revver or anyone else we want, into the same feed.
Comment by Paul — November 12, 2008 @ 2:04 pm
I haven’t had any problems with the latest blip.tv hosted videos. No slow-down or buffering problems or whatnot. But then, my PC can run Bioshock at optimum so there probably shouldn’t be any problems. I also had no interruption in service since I use Charter cable.
Hmm. Come to think of it, this is a rather useless post. But I’m really happy that many, many people can see the vids again. Cheers!
Comment by Evil Jim — November 13, 2008 @ 12:35 am
Using Opera, the on-screen controls don’t work in full screen mode. Probably a problem with blip, but rather annoying to have to hit esc so I can click on pause.
Comment by Eroen — November 15, 2008 @ 7:30 am
I am pleased but not surprised to see Blip interfacing with LRR and their fans on this web site. It is the exceedingly high quality of service I have come to expect from Blip. As a long time blip customer and critic in the internet TV space (http://focus.blip.tv), I have spent a great deal of time comparing hosting services, and I am very glad that LRR has gone with blip to handle their hosting.
Comment by David Kowarsky — November 17, 2008 @ 5:46 pm
nice, really nice!
Comment by RankEnladia — April 16, 2009 @ 6:47 pm