Many of you noticed (and reported) that on 9/26, our push notification system did not appear to be working. This was due to an authentication issue with Apple’s servers preventing our server from connecting to actually send the notifications to your devices.
As of 10:00PM Eastern Standard Time, 9/27, this issue has been resolved and push notifications should now be flowing normally. We apologize for the interruption.
We have been getting an increasing number of users contacting us to report that the video quality in our apps has degraded since their upgrade to iOS6 – so I wanted to take a moment to describe why this is happening.
When we play videos, we are not using a player that we created, we rely on the YouTube playback mechanism built-in to the device. In versions of iOS before 6, a YouTube app was built-in to the operating system. When we requested that a video “play” – it was the built-in YouTube player app that would play the video.
With the release of iOS6, Apple has removed the built-in player app. In order to keep thousands of applications in the store (like ours) that relied on this player from breaking, Apple has chosen to use YouTube’s new iFrame player (HTML5).
The good news is that all of these apps still work. The bad news is that for some reason, the iFrame player does not quite seem to be as good with regards to quality. Additionally, the videos seem to take a bit longer to actually start playing once the link is clicked.
Unfortunately, this player is *NOT* a part of our apps. There is not much that we can do to change the quality of the videos that it plays. We are investigating other options and if we can find a higher quality method of playback, we will update all of our apps to use this new method.
Fortunately for us, all of our apps are stable and our users love them. Our last post to this site, however, was in April – which may lead one to believe that we are not working on enhancements.
No updates on this site, however, doesn’t mean that we aren’t working on the next-gen products. Right now, we are currently evaluating how iOS6 is going to affect our apps, and how we may leverage new features in iOS6 to make the experience inside our apps even better. We are also currently evaluating some new playback mechanisms that would get us away from the terrible lag and buffering issues that seem to plague the built-in YouTube player on iOS devices more often than not.
We hope to have some updates for you soon – in the meantime, if you encounter an issue, or have feature suggestions – please don’t hesitate to send them our way. 🙂
Just wanted to post a quick note to let everyone know the server is back up and running in it’s new home. By now, it should have detected (and pushed) notifications for any videos that were posted by our partners today.
Thanks for your patience during this outage!
We are moving our servers to a new location on Saturday, 4/21/2012 so portions of our services will be unavailable.
All of our YouTube apps will still list and play videos fine, but the following services will be unavailable beginning around 1:30PM Eastern Time:
We currently plan to be back online by midnight eastern time as a worst case scenario, and we hope to be back online much sooner. We thank you for your patience while we move our servers to a location which will help us to continue our trend of growth in the long term.
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