grumpyoldman

Newbie on this forum - after searching for information about faults in ROH relay of 2016 World Ballet Day. From so many complaints, it seems clear that users' many and various ISP streams were affected, and it follows that it was the original server service that was at fault. Something went wrong with the Facebook Live streaming. I experienced the same fault as others have recorded, an interruption to the Royal Ballet transmission, with all efforts to continue being redirected to the same original fault in the stream - a Ms Macmillan piece to camera, before getting stuck again. I was using the World Ballet Day website rather than the Royal Opera House website, but tried others before the fault was cleared. It seems to me that the streaming software, which was from "ooyala.com" was not being actively monitored, else the fault should have been cleared much faster than about the three quarters of an hour that I experienced. It appears that the streaming software buffers the output to the end viewer, for example to deliver all of the content across an interruption in an ISP server stream, thus the end user's watching recommences some time behind the live stream. To that end reloading the software started initially to deliver the current stream, but it updated itself after about two seconds to go back to deliver the stream from the point it was interrupted ie at Ms Macmillan. Once the delayed stream was playing, a selection bar under the video was available to move around the buffer, but it appeared to be covering several hours and all my attempts to rejoin the live stream at the rightmost point were thwarted by being bumped back to the Ms Macmillan break in the Royal Ballet. I watched the whole 20 hours, and this fault only happened on the Royal Ballet streaming (The YouTube recording of the Royal Ballet appears to be faultless). It prompts the thought that maybe there was someone monitoring the output in London, and at mid-day they were minded to take a break as everything was running well and it was the home transmission from the ROH - so they didn't see the fault as it happened and the flaw in their software!