A place to ask WE management questions.

[Graham Wallington]

Many of you have questions that you would like answered. WE have a way for you to ask the presenters questions by emailing Final Control ([e-mail]) The director chooses which questions to ask and reads them to the presenter. However, sometimes the questions are a little difficult for the presenter to answer or they have nothing to do with what is happening on the screen. This is the place to ask those sorts of questions of the WildEarth management.

[Holly Wilson]

Thank you for this spot to ask questions. Last night in the chat room someone noticed that there were not AM drives in the schedule for November. Are the AM drives being cancelled? I hope not because those of us in the US and Canada work during the evening drive time hours and the AM drive, although late at night for us, is the best viewing time. Thank you.

[blueeyedlibra]

Like the new look but why do i keep getting ad after ad. As soon as I click it off another one pops up right benind it. Cant get them to stay away after just a few "x" ing out of them. Hope its just something that needs to be fixed and someone will get to it. This has only chagned since the new look has been changed. Thanks

[Peter Braat]

We'd love to bring you ad-free streams, but as you can imagine serving ads for only 10 minutes with most people watching, and thus incurring bandwidth costs, for hours is simply not sustainable.

And as preroll ads were clearly voted down by our viewers, regular in-stream ads are the only viable option.

Unfortunately the ads are necessary to be able to pay for our costs and keep broadcasting the streams.



blueeyedlibra said:

Like the new look but why do i keep getting ad after ad. As soon as I click it off another one pops up right benind it. Cant get them to stay away after just a few "x" ing out of them. Hope its just something that needs to be fixed and someone will get to it. This has only chagned since the new look has been changed. Thanks

[blueeyedlibra]

ok but the ads were able to be stopped before, now they are not......something has been changed witht he new player. Atleast the old way an ad didnt come up back to back there was minutes in between them. Now its only a few seconds.

Peter Braat said:

We'd love to bring you ad-free streams, but as you can imagine serving ads for only 10 minutes with most people watching, and thus incurring bandwidth costs, for hours is simply not sustainable.

And as preroll ads were clearly voted down by our viewers, regular in-stream ads are the only viable option.

Unfortunately the ads are necessary to be able to pay for our costs and keep broadcasting the streams.



blueeyedlibra said:

Like the new look but why do i keep getting ad after ad. As soon as I click it off another one pops up right benind it. Cant get them to stay away after just a few "x" ing out of them. Hope its just something that needs to be fixed and someone will get to it. This has only chagned since the new look has been changed. Thanks

[Pat]

HI Pete and all of WE,

Is there any way to go back to the old, elegant logo for the window? Personally, I think this new one looks like a child's scrawled printing and makes it almost impossible to do collages. Picasa crops half the logo off. I know that this is (understandably) low on your priorities, but it does mean a lot to many of us who make screen shots and collages. The other logo was really pretty and easy to work with due to its size and placement in the bottom left corner. Thanks for this thread to express our views. I appreciate all the technical work that goes into bringing this wonderful viewing to all of us.

[Snert]

Pete,

With all due respect, I think there is a bigger issue here which maybe you just have not yet witnessed yourself. I am pretty confident that most of my fellow viewers and I understand the need for the ads and support them as we feel they are meant to be implemented. The problem though is that I don't think they are working as intended all the time.

What happens often to me, and others (as expressed in chat) at seemingly random times is that we are completely bombarded with the ads. Usually it is the color ads that have the issue. The ones that are a bit higher up in the video window. What happens is you get one like normal. But when you click on its little "x" to close it, you see it disappear for literally only 50 milliseconds and then it just shows back up again. This repeats over and over and over until you give up. Basically, you could have no break of even 1 second long in the ads over the duration of an hour. In my mind I can't imagine that being done intentionally. I would call it a bug.

I know a lot of the people will say this is a small price to pay for this wonderful service you provide... but I have to say when you have such an insistent box in the middle of the video you are trying to watch it can really ruin the experience more then you would think.

I have tried to make sense out of the apparent randomness of this but have not yet been able to. All I know if that it comes and goes on its own, seemingly to different viewers at different times, and then will eventually just go away again on its own (even without reloading the page). Also, I know that this same problem has been present since the new player was put in place on the main page a couple months ago. At that time because of this bug and several others (some of which may have since been resolved) most of us retreated to the old flash viewer which was still present and working great at the http://www.wildearth.tv/web/djuma1 page. That of course though is now also the new viewer.

I know that several others are experiencing this problem, but i do not know what the common factors may be. As for myself, I have seen it present on both Windows XP and Windows 7 (RTM Ultimate 64-bit) using Interent Explorer (32bit) and flash 10.0.32.18.

One more final thing... regarding the pre-roll ads... I know you folks got a lot of negative feedback on those but I also remember that there were some bugs related to them that may have caused most of the complaints. I remember them causing problems where the video would not load at all after the ad, and with the hotspots the ad would cause the time to be irrelevant and the video would always start playing from the very beginning of its 10 minute segment (not at the point the link would point to). I thought though that hose bugs were resolved, yet only shortly before the pre-roll feature was removed. I just wonder how many of those complaints were due to the problems, and not just the ads being there themselves. After the pre-roll ads were removed there was even a few comments in chat and the comment section of the wildearth.tv page wondering why they were gone as we understood the need for them once they were working properly.


Hopefully this will help shed some more light on the issue.

Thanks




Peter Braat said:

We'd love to bring you ad-free streams, but as you can imagine serving ads for only 10 minutes with most people watching, and thus incurring bandwidth costs, for hours is simply not sustainable.

And as preroll ads were clearly voted down by our viewers, regular in-stream ads are the only viable option.

Unfortunately the ads are necessary to be able to pay for our costs and keep broadcasting the streams.



blueeyedlibra said:

Like the new look but why do i keep getting ad after ad. As soon as I click it off another one pops up right benind it. Cant get them to stay away after just a few "x" ing out of them. Hope its just something that needs to be fixed and someone will get to it. This has only chagned since the new look has been changed. Thanks

[CarolJ]

WE i would like to see a popout player for the game drives. Is that possible.

[Linda Revere (Pepperbird)]

Hello WE Management,

Thank you for this wonderful opportunity to observe and learn about all the animals, weather, geography, and people there in Djuma. I enjoy interacting with the chatters and fans and being able to ask questions of the drive presenter and finalcontrol during the drives.WildEarth is a wonderful--a brilliant--enterprise.

For additional financing, besides ads or subscriptions, is it worth considering grant applications to governments, conservation organizations (especially European and American), universities, and so on? And how about filming your own documentaries and selling them to media--could you create a documentary from the historical video clips you have already accumulated, with various plots built around the interaction and fate of animal groups such as the leopards, lions, ellies, etc? And would it be feasible to apply for green energy grants to use windpower and solar power for your electrical power sources and for running the drive vehicles?

Thanks again,
Linda Revere

[Linda Oldham]

I hope someone can come up with a solution to my problem. On the a.m. drive of Friday, Dec 4, the sound stopped and I have not had sound on WildEarth since. My first steps were to check the status of my volume contro - indeed that the volume and my speakers were working. They were. I can get sound on any other web sites (Youtube, the sound of pieces joining properly on Jigsaw puzzle sites, videos on news provider sites, etc.) I tried rebooting several times and the Windows "music' nearly blew my ears off! I checked with friends who use the same server I do and they had sound on WildEarth. I contacted a computer repair service I have used, he screen-shared and checked my computer thoroughly and could find nothing amiss (he also got sound on WildEarth when he tried the site). He was at a loss and said he would have to research the problem. I run Windows XP, have Norton AntiVirus, Adobe Shockwave 10 (downloaded this morning by computer repairman). Everything, including sound works on every other site EXCEPT WildEarth
Anyone have a clue - or better yet a fix?

[Al]

Linda,

Your repairman may not have known that all versions of the Flash player need to be removed by a special Adobe program BEFORE installing the Flash player 10 and that special settings are required for the new viewers. Go to the following link and perform the procedures under "Insure proper programs are on your machine" and "Repair of Africam and Djuma Viewers".
http://wedjafrica.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=fixit

Once you've completed the procedures, clear your cookies and temporary internet files.

Al

[Peter Braat]

It probably is not the reason, but we've had it before that viewers had clicked on the sound icon below the player to mute it and then forgot this and thought there was a problem for days on end. Migh be worth to double-check though.

Linda Oldham said:

I hope someone can come up with a solution to my problem. On the a.m. drive of Friday, Dec 4, the sound stopped and I have not had sound on WildEarth since. My first steps were to check the status of my volume contro - indeed that the volume and my speakers were working. They were. I can get sound on any other web sites (Youtube, the sound of pieces joining properly on Jigsaw puzzle sites, videos on news provider sites, etc.) I tried rebooting several times and the Windows "music' nearly blew my ears off! I checked with friends who use the same server I do and they had sound on WildEarth. I contacted a computer repair service I have used, he screen-shared and checked my computer thoroughly and could find nothing amiss (he also got sound on WildEarth when he tried the site). He was at a loss and said he would have to research the problem. I run Windows XP, have Norton AntiVirus, Adobe Shockwave 10 (downloaded this morning by computer repairman). Everything, including sound works on every other site EXCEPT WildEarth
Anyone have a clue - or better yet a fix?

[Karen-inVA (Moderator)]

Hi JP,
You can continue to post in this week's thread as the week is not quite over yet. I corrected the date to read thru Dec. 5th instead of Dec. 4th.
Thanks for bringing it to our attention.


JP said:

Hello WE Managment.
Could someone open the Cam Sighting Discussion Forum for this week please ?

I remember the time when I could do it myself....
Thanks