Radio Downloads Fine ...

[Christopher Woods]

On 24 July 2014 12:30:21 Chris J Brady <chrisjbrady at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Some have opined that the iPlayer outage coincided with the announcement of 
> further bans on those downloading films and music. But all is working fine 
> today.
>
> I notice that the time for listening on iPlayer has now been extended to 4 
> weeks. Maybe it was the sudden increase in loads on the server that caused 
> the outage?

Good guess :) but coincidental. The duration lengthening was a scheduled 
improvement (see iPlayer press release from 4th of April on the BBC Trust 
site, "Trust approves 30-day catch up window"). Local Radio programmes have 
also moved to a new ingest system which has allowed them to increase the 
listen again availability period.

Speaking to people who know more about it than me, the weekend snafu boiled 
down to database issues - the video infrastructure used across the site 
uses common APIs and its underlying database structure got a bit knobbled, 
but they fixed it pretty smartly.

Susprisingly only a couple of hundred of complaints, a few people 
apparently emailing in saying they knew programming languages and could 
they offer any help :D