Author: Anu

Over the Thanksgiving, we ran our largest public beta yet. Expanding from a dozen users to over a hundred. This was announced on Reddit Boston . This was an excellent learning opportunity that stress tested the service.

As expected, increasing the concurrent traffic volume by an order of magnitude revealed bugs. Thanksgiving day football traffic caused multiple failures that we were able to investigate and improve. A lot of the issues related to the configuration of the CDN. The initial configuration had a low cache hit rate (10%) which manifested in much higher server load further down the stack. LocalTV+ is built as a collection of micro services, which can be scaled up or down as needed to optimize for cost/traffic. The cache failure rate began to increase load on other services which eventually became high CPU load on a service I never expected high load on.

We made changes to the CDN on Friday and in time for college and NFL games over Saturday and Sunday. This was a much more successful test. The cache fixes worked and the load was moved to the CDN. Overall when the signal was ok, almost everyone was able to watch the game with little to no issues. The issues that were reported were the infrequent freezing and re-buffering for a few seconds. We will continue to test and if the performance is consistent we will be able to open up the beta testing to more users.

Over the course of the weekend we also opened up a dedicated subreddit for general discussion and feedback.

Other findings:

1. Several crashing bugs related to tvOS were identified
2. Persistent errors on first login / registration about not being able to get streaming links
3. The need to improve onboarding and the UI in many places e.g. highlighting on tvOS
4. Airplay to non Apple devices work most of the time but is inconsistent.
5. CBS continues to be a problem. This is related to the current antenna location.
6. We will publish an FAQ soon. This will answer many common questions. e.g. Android (Yes, but will be later) or closed captions (Yes, it is just currently disabled while testing)

I realize that we have never shared images of the AppleTV UI. Oddly, while iOS gets more use, this was the original app with the iOS port coming later. The TV UI still needs a lot of polish, but it already feels quite pleasant to use. Just like iOS, it support picture in picture.

LocalTV+ is currently available for beta testers in Boston. If you aren’t currently a tester you may be wondering what the app is like. We are aiming for an app that feels like it is native to iOS with a user experience that doesn’t hate you. The video below shows how you can quickly switch from show to show and utilize picture in picture to go to other apps without interruption.

Cable is expensive and an entire generation does not know that over the air TV (NBC, CBS, PBS, FOX etc.) is free with a cheap antenna. People think it’s an illegal hack despite this being how people have gotten TV for generations. Additionally, a lot of people live in areas and homes served by these stations but do not receive a good signal due to environmental obstruction such as trees or hills. US law has a provision for this to allow non profits to retransmit the signal to resolve this issue. There was an attempt by Locast to do this recently but it was shut down not due to the retransmission, which everyone agrees was legal, but the way they monetized and used their money.

LocalTV+ is an attempt to provide unmodified TV signals for certain markets in the US over the internet. It should not be necessary for people to buy expensive plans on streaming providers or go to pirate websites to watch signals that are free. Viewing a show on a phone should be as straight forward as watching something on Netflix. You also should not need to hunt down which balkanized streaming service a popular show or sport is airing on.

LocalTV+ is currently in private beta for iOS for just the Boston market. There will be a TvOS version soon. Watch this site for updates.