The morning before the HTML5 player rollout was supposed to happen, we tested it for an hour on Vaughn Live. And the result? Well, it was pretty bad. Our video edge servers couldn’t handle the added overhead of HLS live streaming. We’ve narrowed the issue down to our video server software vendor which we feel is far too bloated and inefficient due to the fact it runs on Java.

Bloated server software + higher overhead per connection = bad

So when does the new HTML5 player come to all channels? We’re in the middle of getting the server overhead issue sorted, which is working out better than expected. No ETA yet!

So, on to the video embeds update (our video player placed on someone else’s website.) The new HTML5 player is released on all Vaughn Live embed players. But we need to have a serious talk about video embeds. Right now embeds are a major resource drain on us, financially and server capacity. We want to give those that come to our sites the best experience possible, so we will be making changes to the video embeds in the very near future.

Here is a list of upcoming video embed changes:

• Embeds will be disabled by default. The channel owner will need to explicitly enable them.
• If a stream has more than 100 Live Viewers, the embed player will display a message asking the viewer to either sign in with their VIP account or go our website to watch the stream
• Introduction of video embed guidelines. Such as no embedding on sites with malware, links to/promotion of illegal content, no placing ads/overlays on the player. This isn’t the final draft of the embed guidelines, but a good idea of what to expect.
• Violating the embed guidelines will result in the website in question being blocked from embedding.

We hope you all had a very safe and Happy 4th of July!