I got in eventually... still in now. Just says "OFFLINE" Please Stand By... then there is a message saying due to the high demand they had problems with their servers and it will be re-sheduled.
I hope it's a wake-up call about the interest they hold for online Vegas stuff . . .
It really is a good sign that so many would show up that Sony servers can't handle the traffic...
How many does t take to "crash" their servers? 100k - 200k? 500k . .
Whatever the amount there has to be a thought that THEY think they have less interested people than happened? OR their "Sign-up" system hasn't been drilled thru'
"Hey Guy, we have had 50k sign up. What should we do?"
Took me 40 minutes to actually get to the flash circular wait thingie. Kept getting timed out errors. Just kept clicking the "Try Again" button while I did my morning exercises.
Then it took Oh, 10 - 15 min to get to an intermittant "offline" colourbar.
Then Firefox locked up.
THEN Windows task manager locked up.
Then I got mad :-) and restarted Firefox and THEN finally one and a half hours after I started the whole episode I got the reschedulted for next Wed message.
The strange thing was though, that at no time during this whole process did I get a single byte of Audio.
I still remember the adds all those years ago with that goofy guy doing the song and dance on stage and wondering whether I should dump Sonar :-)
i'm new to webinars. foolishly thought that the registration process was to help alleviate such server problems. wasted an entire morning rescheduling around teh webinar which wasn't. in reading online forums with teh problems experienced recently with vegas, how coudl sony NOT expect to have a huge turnout? so will i reschedule another day for their rescheduled webinar? i think not.
I'll bet it was more of a problem with the software they were using to host the webinar with. If you look at their webpage-"up and running in two minutes-honest" ya pull the other leg and it plays...
There was a "chat" box to the right of the viewer where you can communicate with the presenter. The presenter kept giving updates that they were working on the server issues. Finally, they gave up and said they would reschedule
I've done a bunch of webinars over the last six months. Not one of them was trouble-free, regardless of machines, browsers, OS versions, and anything else that could be a problem on the participant end.
It's just early days, like in the early days of the automobile, "Going on a 100 mile trip? OK, bring six spare tires and hope for the best."
LOL!
I've done countless webinars w/ netowrk hardware vendors and software vendors so this technology is not new. I agree, it's not easy, just need competent staff to get it to work.
That's what happens when Big company bean counters rather hire cheap techs, thinking they are saving money w/ paper MCSE, CCNA, CCNP certs who don't know their S#!+ (or worse, out source their IT) vs. seasoned vets..
Seen lots of these idiots w/ impressive resumes, but can't perform when the $#!+ hits the fan.. LOL!
Now they know how many of us are out here!
Multiple thousands sitting, watching a colour chart.
Hanging on every apology.
Waiting to ask questions of Vegas gods, but alas, our audience is not to be.
It were a WEBIMARE.
See you next week Madison, if there isn't anything else to do.
Won't build the day around it again though.
It's called blind, deaf and dumb loyalty.
We still love yooz guys anyway.
We'd rather have it this way than learn a new NLE.
Yes they do, Dan...
providing the crash didn't delete all the log information about how many were logged on for the webinar... (argh)
I hope they get it worked out before the next attempt ... I was really looking forward to the whole experience with real live virtual people from Sony... (grin)
I doubt that SCS was serving up the webcast in-house. They probably contracted with an outside CDN (content delivery network) to actually stream the session to the viewers.
I do a lot of webcasting and there is a large part of it that is out of my control. Last week, I streamed a four-day conference totaling about 24 hours of live content to about 5,000 people all over the world. It worked pretty well except for Saturday morning when the CDN's server in Phoenix started acting up and the stream was intermittent for about 30 minutes. I was on the phone with the techs, but there wasn't anything that I could actually do to fix the problem. Of course, the viewer isn't blaming the CDN, they're blaming me. Stuff happens.
Hello John,
I certainly hoped they weren't trying it from in-house...
I've not done much of it myself, but can imagine the coordination and preparation that must take place for a successful event...
Exactly the point about who gets the bad rap for failed attempt... maybe Sony should have beta tested it with a few dozen invited individuals. . . hindsight is so 20-20, isn't it? (grin)