TiVo’s Stephen Mack sent me the following statement about the issues some of you have reported experiencing with Netflix streaming.
Folks, thanks for your patience and we apologize for the launch issues that some of you have experienced.
Volume has been much higher than anticipated. We’ve been working around the clock to resolve these issues. As part of the solution, we are quickly moving to add more capacity to the system.
Our entire team will be monitoring closely tonight, and over the last few days we have put in place measures that should improve performance and stability. However, we know that tonight some of you will continue to see failures (although the problems should be less frequent).
If you do see problems, we ask that you try again later. We do expect that starting tomorrow, we will be able to fix performance and you will no longer see these issues with any regularity.
In a separate issue, some of you have reported issues with particular videos, such as lip sync issues with a show such as 30 Rock season 1 episode 1. We believe these issues are related to the video assets and we are working closely with Netflix to correct any bad videos as quickly as possible. Netflix does have a list of videos with known issues that have been reported, and they are working as fast as they can to correct all of them. In the meantime, they request you contact them to report any problems you see with a particular video. (If a video always skips or breaks up at a certain point, no matter what time of day, that’s most likely a bad video issue that only Netflix can address.)
We know you’re excited to use the Netflix application — we are excited as well and we apologize for these problems. I’ll keep you updated here on the forums with our progress in correcting the issues. Thanks again for your patience.
Best regards,
Stephen
I’m sure TiVo and Netflix will get these issues ironed out soon. It isn’t unusual to have some teething issues with the launch of a new feature. But this is such a high profile feature that I’m sure fixing the issues will have a very high priority.