Time Warner Cable Cuts iPad Live TV Access 50%

Junior Samples writes "According to the article: 'Time Warner Cable March 16 slashed the number of channels available for live streaming on the Apple iPad — less than 24 hours after launching the TV Everywhere app. The No. 2 cable operator reduced to 15 channels from the original 32 offered up as the first-ever live TV broadcasts available for streaming on a portable media device. The concept allows participating media providers to grant unlimited on-demand access across multiple devices to monthly subscribers at no additional charge.'"

Comments

Re:Quickly kill it before it grows too strong!

[FliesLikeABrick]

http://www.twcableuntangled.com/2011/03/heavy-demand-crashed-our-ipad-app-last-night-it%E2%80%99s-not-a-good-party-unless-you-run-out-of-beer/

It was actually because they had capacity issues and have temporarily reduced the number of channels available so as to not knock the whole service offline again.

(full disclosure: I used to work for TWC)

It's a server issue

[frdmfghtr]

According to 9to5Mac, it's a server issue not pissed-off providers (although there may be some of those too)

http://www.9to5mac.com/56532/time-warner-ipad-app-crashed-servers-halve-offering/

‘It’s not a good party unless you run out of beer,’ says TWC in regards to the loss of channels in the iPad app today. They deny outages are being caused by programmers who could have pulled their content even though some are reportedly upset.

It appears that it actually isn’t the streaming load that is buckling the servers, but the authentication servers according to ablog post by Time Warner Cable’s Jeff Simmermon:

Our engineering team is working as hard as they can to put a fix in place and get everything up and running as soon as they can. For the time being, the app is running with only 15 channels. We have found that by temporarily reducing the number of available channels, we can ease strain on the authentication process. This will enable us to offer at least some sort of an experience to our customers while we get a fix in place. We’ll add the other 17 channels back in as soon as we can fix the underlying issue, and we’ll be adding more channels in future iterations of the app as well.

Re:Bait and Switch

[cgenman]

According to this article, their authentication servers got overloaded, and they cut down the number of channels to reduce the authentication load while they bought more.

While I normally rally against evil corporations hiding the truth, somehow "we couldn't convince the higher-ups to buy enough servers until everything went to pot" seems like normal operating launch-day problems.