Well I must say that our first late night drive was very disapointing. Moments before the drive began at 22h00 CAT a few sad people decided to see if they could ‘hack’ into our live repeater. Now our live repeater in Pretoria, South Africa, is where the Flash stream is collected from Djuma and where Zaplive grabs the stream and then serves it out to you from Holland. Well the minute more than 10 streams are ‘grabbed’ from this repeater it shuts out everyone else. It does this because it was never designed to serve the public, but merely provide us with a way of distributing the stream.
So in effect because a few people so badly wanted to avoid the advertising, that is there to make our broadcasting viable, they prevented everyone else from watching our first late night drive. This is one of the most selfish things I have seen done. I would like to let those people know that it takes a massive amount of effort to do what WE do, not to mention expense. WE do this because we love it and really believe that it is worth doing for the benefit of all. Your selfishness has no place in our WildEarth.
It took us hours until early in the morning to figure out what had happened … I hope you few people really enjoyed your ad free night drive!
Tonight WE will try again. WE have made every effort to put the necessary security in place, but to be honest this is a bit of an Achilles heal in our system. It can be permanently resolved, but it will create a huge amount of work and may result in a fragmented archive … another great consequence of the selfishness, ignorance and frankly rudeness of a few.
I completley understand that few, if any, people like advertsing in their viewing. WE have gone to some effort to keep this advertising to a minimum. WE have not covered our pages with tons and tons of garish ads. WE have to put it in-stream because otherwise WE are not motivated to make good content, just create good marketing (this involves a much bigger explanation, but take it from me in-stream is the way). I don’t, however, think that one has to be a genius to realise that running a broadcast like WildEarth from the middle of the African wilderness and delivering it to a global audience is very very expensive. And if WE all want it to continue it will need to be made viable. And the only way to make it viable, and still FREE, is to include advertising. Now I don’t expect you to love the advertising, but I don’t think it is too much to ask that you put up with it (hell you might even click the odd ad if you are interested in the product) in return for the immense effort it takes to bring you the only content of its type on earth. The only truly real nature programming in the world!
I am sorry about this rant, but I am very very upset when fellow humans behave in such a selfish way … it is just not in our nature … and if it is, it is certainly not in the nature of those that are part of the WEfamily.