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.
