62 successful live streams and 2 fails – We fired our Dacast video live streaming service today

NOTE: The first episode of “Boxed Out” with Amanda Lynn WAS SUCCESSFULLY RECORDED. Only the live stream failed. WE WILL BE POSTING THE RECORDED SHOW as soon as possible.

If you tried to watch our important livestream of the debut episode of “Boxed Out” with Amanda Lynn, then you were very frustrated. It was terrible. Video and audio cut out repeatedly until the stream completely froze.

As frustrated as you are, we are frustrated even more.

After a similar fail in our deeply important Dacast live stream of our John J. Nance interview about a month ago, we put our streaming service on notice. Today was the last straw.

We have been successfully live streaming with Dacast for almost a year. Our first successful Dacast video live stream was in October 2023, and we experienced no fails until last month. We had streamed successfully 55 times in a row when the first fail happened. After that first Dacast fail, the vendor reluctantly admitted it was 100 percent their fault, after initally blaming us. We had to drag that out of Dacast. They did not apologize, nor offer us any type of credit to our account (which still has a $600 credit balance). My gut was maybe it was time to let Dacast go, if only to their unprofessional customer service. That’s on me. Plus, we carry that large credit balance with Dacast, and we were loathe to try to claw it back.

So we went ahead and completed more successful live streams. But today we experienced the second prominent failure.

This isn’t baseball. In this case, two strikes and you’re out. We’ve used a terabyte of bandwidth over those 62 streams (quite a lot). We’ve streamed to up to 462 people a the same time. But a fail is a fail. And two fails is a pattern.

If you’re looking for an apology, we deeply apologize.

Everything about what we’ve been doing is about being reliable to the community. So we will continue to make changes until we have the right vendors, and of course we are fully responsible for learning from our own mistakes. At the moment, we are not aware of mistakes on our end, but we are objectively open to learning of one or more operator errors.

Based on everything we can see, Dacast has let us down a second time, despite promises after the first fail.

For those willing to give us more tries, please know we strive to be a reliable source of news and information. It is our job to have the right vendors and to use their services correctly.

After last month’s Dacast fail we decided to replace them with two new services, so we could have switched to the second service almost immediately. We still had not yet settled on the second service, so now we will move to two. We will get to a point of higher reliability in live streaming as fast as possible.