Offline viewer hours

[derbynewsnetwork]

We are a new premium subscriber and we were very excited to move to a more reliable "full-service" streaming solution after years of using ustream and justin. Our feeds have become very popular and those services weren't cutting it anymore. Now I'm a bit disgusted; here's why:

We did a big event on Sunday and then went offline at about 6:30pm. I checked the report the next day to find that over 2000 viewer hours had been logged that day (Monday) even though we'd been offline the whole day. I emailed support about it; below is the email I got back.

Personally I feel this policy is at best lazy and at worst a deliberate scam. Clearly, the livestream system is aware when my feed is offline and the company has made the decision to charge for these useless viewer-hours anyway. Consider if the cell phone company charged you even if you don't answer the phone. Someone could call you and let the phone ring for an hour and you'd have to pay for that hour. Total, total bs.

In the entire process of setting up our account, configuring our channel, and configuring the embed player, there was no warning that this would happen. What if I hadn't noticed it and just left the embedded player on that page for a month? I'd be paying huge overage fees for a screen full of color bars. Real nice livestream, thanks.

Can anyone convince me that there's a good reason for this and I shouldn't immediately cancel my premium account? As I said before, we were really excited for this upgrade in our streaming. But we had some bad quality issues, which is another matter, and now this. Very sad panda.



The support reply:
------------
Hello,

Thanks for contacting us. I reviewed your channel and usage and found that most
of the traffic is coming from your embedded player. Please note that when users
reach your embedded player viewer hours are used, even when you are offline.

To prevent unnecessary usage you can do any of the following:

-Set your embedded player to "autoplay=true" to false - This will require the
user to press the play button to start viewing.
-Move your channel to the free plan when not streaming live
-Restart the channel when your live stream is over to knock off viewers

To restart a channel:

-Login to your account center
-Next to the channel, Click on the "More" button
-click the "Restart" button


Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Best Regards,

Henry Bernard
Livestream Producer Support

[SHOWIT]

Yea - I gotta agree with ya on this....just came back to my account and had our viewer time double and had no idea why. The very least Livestream should do is make sure that people are aware that when someone is viewing an off-line page it's still racking up viewer minutes...and hopefully they are working hard to fix this because it's kinda crazy that they are tracking it this way.

Love the product but I'm sure people aren't too thrilled when they find out this is going on.

Cheers,
dj

[benhomer]

Livestream is designed to function as a 24/7 live broadcast platform for live and on-demand video. When the channel is not live Auto-pilot runs by default and you can replace the offline clip with any content for auto-pilot rotation.

So to clarify, when the offline clip is playing it isn't an offline page, but a default clip that can be replaced with any other content. In any case, if you feel that this isn't communicated properly that is valid feedback and we can look into ways to make this more clear to Premium users.

-Ben
Livestream Support

[alcalaonline]

Hi all, im reading the post, because im thinking about change to premium to stream a event.

I want to stream a carnival in a theater. My question: Can I change my plan to premium, activate the premium usage during the live stream, and when event is over, change to free plan, with ads, and no pay for offline content viewing?

Thanks in advance

[mbaron]

Originally Posted by alcalaonline

Hi all, im reading the post, because im thinking about change to premium to stream a event.

I want to stream a carnival in a theater. My question: Can I change my plan to premium, activate the premium usage during the live stream, and when event is over, change to free plan, with ads, and no pay for offline content viewing?

Thanks in advance

alcalaonline,

You can switch your Premium channel to free after you are done streaming to avoid being charged overages for viewer hours going over your allotment. You will have ads however as you've already pointed out.

Matt Baron
Livestream Producer Support

[Dragonshadow]

So they rack up on an embedded player, but do offline viewer hours rack up on your main channel page (livestream.com/whatever) if you're offline?

[mbaron]

Dragonshadow,

Viewer hours are accounted for on the main channel page, as well as any other place you have the Livestream player embedded.

Matt

[Dragonshadow]

Yeaaaaa charging viewer hours while the channel is offline is a scam move.

[jasonlive]

Originally Posted by Dragonshadow

Yeaaaaa charging viewer hours while the channel is offline is a scam move.

There are ways to avoid this such as password protecting your channel page, restricting embeds, and also setting "AutoPlay=False" on embeds.

Best,
Jason

[benhomer]

Based on your feedback we have now rolled out a platform change which prevents tracking of offline clip usage. You will no longer see this tracked for premium billing and analytics.

Keep in mind that this is only the case when the offline default clip is the only content in auto-pilot. If you replace that clip with any other content in auto-pilot it will count toward usage and be tracked in analytics.

-Ben
Livesteam Support