Tag Archives: blip.tv

Category5 RSS feeds could be 5500% faster with more world accessibility by switching away from Blip.tv for RSS distribution.

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I’ve been hearing for a while that Blip.tv is slow.

It’s never seemed bad to me, but I didn’t really have anything to compare it to.  I have to be honest, I really love the features Blip.tv gives to its producers.  Not so much to its viewers.  But to the producers.  The automated file conversions from FTP uploaded masters is an exceptional time saver in post, and the automated upload to YouTube, while not perfect, also saves some redundant work for me after the show each Tuesday night.

So, to hear that Blip.tv is slow seemed backward to me; it is a real time saver.  To me, a show producer.

Last July, we launched a syndicate in China, because Blip.tv is blocked in China and our viewers were crying out (in particular, Mainland China residents who had traveled to places like Germany for school and had fallen in love with the show, which is very popular there).

So for kicks, I thought I’d test the speed difference between Blip.tv and our China syndication system.

For this little experiment, I used the exact same file from 3 sources (Blip.tv, Amazon S3 and our China syndication system).

Here are the shocking results:

File:  Episode 295, H.264 SD Quality, 246378147 Bytes (235 MB).
Blip.TV:  34m 25s, 117 KB/s
Amazon S3:  52s, 4.48 MB/s
Our China Syndication System:  37s, 6.19M/s

I’m sorry, what?  Blip.tv took nearly 35 minutes to download the episode, whereas our syndication system into Mainland China, which is housed at our datacentre in California, took only 37 seconds!  That’s basically one second for every minute it took through Blip.tv.  I did not expect that!  I’m also impressed that the little syndicating system (which I designed) outperformed S3.

No, we are not going to drop Blip.tv.  It has its place, and that place is as I described.  They’re a big part of our distribution chain.  But perhaps it’s best to retire them as the source for our RSS feeds and let them stick to what they do best: from the encoding to the distribution to YouTube.

So I have a feeling our system which was built to help viewers in China watch the show may soon become our world-wide source for RSS files.  What do you think?  Want to receive Category5 episode 5500% faster?

Now, to git’r done!

Comment below.

@Blip is [no longer] down.

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Blip.TV, the video provider relied upon by many independent digital shows has been down since a little after 2am PST, according to isitdownrightnow.com.

Because of this, any videos hosted on Blip.TV (for example, Category5 Technology TV on-demand and main RSS feeds) are entirely inaccessible, and even the Blip.tv web site is not available during the outage.

I must say, this is a first that I’ve ever seen such an extended outage for Blip.TV, who have always been pretty reliable in spite of their growth. Their Twitter feed is silent, and since their site is down, we know nothing yet about what’s going on, but we know it’s down, and has been down for several hours.

Update #1 – Auto tweets and blog entries continue to auto-post (albeit, laced with deadlinks), but no sign of any realtime notes from Blip.TV directly.

Update #2 – Tasherre Risay commented below that Blip.TV is located in New York.  Absolutely understandable then that there’d be issues.  I hope everyone is okay, and our thoughts and prayers go out.  Hoping for at least an update as to the status and what’s actually happening.

Update #3 – 11am Eastern: as Peggy George commented, the Error 503 message has been updated on Blip.tv to the following:
I received a note from Blip “We are currently experiencing unexpected downtime due to flood water in Manhattan affecting our colocation data center. We expect to be back up within the hour as the generators come online but may experience temporary outages through Friday.”  Our thoughts continue to be with the Blip team and all those who are affected by Hurricane Sandy.

Update # 4 – Annie Tsai (Blip.tv’s social media manager) informed us below that she’ll be able to update us via social media now that she has access to power.

Update # 5 – 12:45pm Eastern – Blip.tv is responding and serving up videos!

#Cat5TV making its way to #China.

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Hongjiang wrote me this week, “Hi Robbie: I am a Chinese college student. Several months ago I was in Germany. During that time I discovered “Category 5 Technology TV” through internet, and fell in love with the show instantly. But what’s really frustrating is that after I got back to China, I can not watch the show any more! Even though I can still access to your website and read the notes. I think it’s because of some networking policy of mainland China (The same reason we can not get access to Youtube or Facebook). Now my only solution is to ask some friend in Hongkong to help downloading the show and sending it to me weekly.”

Well Hongjiang, you’re not the first to make mention of this problem, and it’s been haunting me for some time that the “Great Firewall of China” blocks your access to Category5 Technology TV.
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