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Oprah's Webcast Exceeds Operating Capacity

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Posted by Ken Molay
March 3 2008 10:45 PM EDT

 | 10 comments

Oprahtv

The last time I saw a statistic, Oprah's webcast "class" covering "A New Earth" had over 700,000 registrations. Like hundreds of thousands of others, I logged in to see how it went.

Things started off promisingly. I liked the pre-show countdown telling people how long it would be until "the doors opened" so you could get a seat in the virtual classroom. They let people connect starting thirty minutes before show time. They ran some recorded snippets from Oprah shows to keep the audience entertained while showing another countdown clock at the bottom of the video window showing how long to showtime.

Just in case you were wondering about the economics of an event of this size, an indication is that Chevrolet, Post-it, and Skype bought sponsorship rights in the top frame of the media player window and the show started with some video advertisements before moving on to a closeup of Oprah.

The early few minutes went pretty smoothly. I noticed a brief puase to rebuffer the video every now and then, but generally I was getting good performance on my home cable modem (with the "turbocharge" performance option courtesy of Time Warner). The Move media player would resynch to the live feed when it had to stop to buffer, so you would lose the paused section rather than letting the webcast drag farther and farther behind real time.

The player window showed a type-in frame to the right of the video. It was set up more like an email interface than a traditional live chat feature. You were required to fill in your name, email, telephone, city, and country when asking a question. I tried a test message without filling in the demographic fields and noted a design flaw. The labels for Name, Telephone, and Email switched over to error messages indicating the required format, but losing the identifiers telling you what information you were supposed to enter in each box.

I quickly realized that this was going to be primarily a straight one-way webcast with a standard studio feed of the TV cameras and audio out to the streaming player. From time to time they could pick one of the submitted chat messages to respond to, but for the most part there was no need to be holding it live for the worldwide audience (Oprah mentioned registrations from 139 countries). You'd get just as much benefit from watching a recording.

As we got to roughly the 18 minute point of the webcast, performance started degrading. Buffering went from sub-second to multi-second. And the play time between buffer pauses decreased. Eventually my player simply froze.

I tried all the standard tests... I shut down all other processes and applications, I closed the player and restarted it from the launch page, and I tested my internet performance by looking at other websites. No problems anywhere but on Oprah's feed.

When I came back to the player and the feed, the video window stayed black for a few minutes. Then suddenly it started showing a clip from an old Oprah show with women discussing menstrual problems in a level of detail that threw me for a loop. There was a time code superimposed over the image, but I couldn't tell if it came from the recorded clip or related to the live feed that wasn't displaying.

I tried closing and opening the media player a few more times and never had any more success in recovering the video feed. I did some other work for a while and tried one more shot at Oprah's class. This time they had updated the launch page with a message in red saying that they were experiencing technical difficulties due to internet congestion and suggesting that people watch the archived recording at a later time.

Obviously I wasn't alone in my reception problems, as we started getting comments almost immediately on my previous post from readers saying that they couldn't see the show.

This is a pity. It looks like I need to change my previous post from "Why You Should Thank Oprah" to "Why You Should Pity Oprah." (Or depending on your mood, you can substitute an appropriate verb... "Curse"?   "Laugh At"?)

We had an opportunity to get a worldwide audience enthused about interactive communications via the web. Instead, we just left a bad taste in the mouths of lots of first-timers. Tsk tsk.

Tags: webcast, eckhart tolle, a new earth, oprah

  

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Comments:

  • My wife and my 13 year old son watched this with me. After the site crashed and giving it a lot of time to catch up, we discussed the same as you, how this was no different than watching a recording; which I think we will do in the future since there is no real benefit struggling live. It was my son who commented that Oprah should have broad casted to America live on TV thereby relieving a ton of bandwidth for the rest of the world.

    Posted by Steve
    About 1 year ago

  • My wife watched this webcast and she had trouble getting in even though she logged in well in advance of the start time and then it froze after about 10 minutes. I had to hard shut down my computer and now I cannot get by the Welcome page on Windows XP. Any advice?

    Posted by Ron
    About 1 year ago

  • I too signed up early, and the "pre-show" ran fine, but shortly after the webcast began it froze and I was unable to even get oprah.com. Wish I could help.

    Posted by Martin Ivancic
    About 1 year ago

  • I had a similar experience with my web feed. It was a great introduction for the first half hour. The video was very smooth and the content was quite inspiring. The best for me was to see Eckhart Tolle live. He radiated the calm that he writes about. Now this morning the Oprah.com website is not active. I cannot get on, Odd that I do not even get an error message. I imagine that the download crowd will be as great as the web cast crowd was. Eventually Oprah's group will figure out an answer and a classy one at that! I have faith.

    Posted by Rich
    About 1 year ago

  • We hurried home from a meeting so I could take my seat and, unfortunately exactly the same thing happened here! I'm glad to know it wasn't my computer with a problem. Anyway, I'd rather watch it at my convenience. Trust that the "replay" on oprah.com will be in operation later today (Tuesday).

    Posted by M Drake
    About 1 year ago

  • I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Harpo last night for the wrapup meeting with the technology folks. Hat's off to Oprah for believing in the technology and putting her creds on the line. A simple webcast would have been fine. Being "interactive" with 700K+ folks is impossible. This AM, her main site was down. Ah, IT.

    Posted by Bill LaRocque, Blue Ridge Cartoons, http://boomrbill.com
    About 1 year ago

  • Question: Did I have to open something other than the site, etc..? I took my seat with no problem, saw the countdown; however, the only time I got any feed was when I left and re-entered. I believe the message to me had something to do with the speed time I was functioning at??? I am using a very fast, new computer. As an aside, I was also disappointed that the live webcast did not fulfill its intended promise. On the other hand, this may be my ego speaking. Hats off to Oprah for dreaming big!

    Posted by J Fischer
    About 1 year ago

  • I'd like to point out that the link to "Oprah's webcast 'class'" in the first sentence of your article is broken.

    Posted by RL
    About 1 year ago

  • There is a reason why everyone watching the event together makes it more powerful. The Bible says 'where 2 or more are gathered in my name, there I am' or something close to that. It doesn't matter what your 'I am' is, the energy of the group mind is a powerful energy. That's why politicians hold rallies and why dictators suppress public gatherings. Namasthe

    Posted by Crystal
    About 1 year ago

  • Oprah's compulsive need to "go big" or go home, has finally caught up with her. Whether it's Oprah's Big Give or Big Earth, perhaps it's time Oprah came down from the mighty platform she has built for herself and the pedestal many have created for her. This webcast was not Eckharts idea, I know Eckhart having met him when he gave his first lecture in Vancouver. He is humble, quiet and has NO ego. Oprah has. . It's time for her to really listen to what Eckhart is saying; "park your ego", remain humble, listen to the inner voice and pay attention to the NOW. Oprah, the universe is giving you a message with all the technological problems. Pay attention to the message and stop trying to capture the world, just be YOU, as all of us need to be. Each one reach one--no technology, just good old fashioned one on one human contact!

    Posted by Allan, The Centre for Zentrepreneurism, http://www.zentrepreneurism.com
    About 1 year ago

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