Go figure. High demand and the lack of infrastructure to deal with such an issue.

@Ryan Gard:

Psh. That never happens.

Gosh, let's offer movies for 1 cent knowing the system will probably crash. What idiot thought their network could handle this???

That, and did they think a few people might you know, just browse, and a few more might actually just stay in to watch a movie for almost free? Like instead of 30,000 people?

I hate to defend them, but it was probably marketing people's idea for the $.01 movies, and they didn't consult the people that actually made the on demand work.

@Ryan Gard:

In the cable industry? Perish the thought..

It appears no one never trademarked "On Demand". I assume Comcast missed this one. Idiot marketing teams!

It just continues to show Time Warners inefficiency when it comes to putting money back into their infrastructure. They continue to raise their rates year after year with virtually no improvement to their delivery systems. TWC is a consumer headache and a joke to customer service.

you know, they were better off giving their customers a free weekend viewing as a "customer appreciation" and it wouldn't have created so much havoc with the backfire..*BaNG* (hahahaha) that's what greediness gets you!

Soooo alienate the users that actually pay to use the service by bringing down the service.

I work at the VOD vendor for Time Warner L.A. I am trying to find out more about the meltdown. I can already comment on a few things I've seen in the discussion here so far:

-The local TWC technical people are most definitely in the loop in marketing decisions. They are key in implementing those decisions. They are smart, hardworking, and exercise independent judgment. Management listens to them and makes an informed risk decision, bad or good.

-It's most likely that the VOD backend melted before the physical plant reached capacity. Usually, if a network capacity issue is at play, it's in particular geographic areas where — yes — infrastructure is not meeting demand. But the VOD session management software would stall before network capacity was ever exceeded in a great plurality of service areas.

@Ryan Gard: Selling services you can't provide. Is this a new marketing model?

@jsbeagle: So you think the marketing folks should get a pass for not bothering to check with engineering to make sure that the system could handle the volume their promotion was sure to generate? I'm not exactly inclined to agree with you on that.

@Ayanami:

No, it's an old one.

First Paul Allen inflicts the backward slash on an unsuspecting public. To say nothing of Windows. Then he forces vast swaths of SoCal to watch Shakespeare 2.
What did the human race ever do to you, Paul, that made you hate us so?

@Trai_Dep: Paul Allen's crimes were committed through the Charter Communications Syndicate. :)

I was one of the unlucky ones. Purchased "Burn After Reading" in HD for a penny, and was watching it. Right around 43 minutes, the movie simply stopped, and when I navigated to the menu to continue playing, it showed that I hadn't even bought it. When I tried to buy it again, the system gave me errors. The On-Demand system from Time Warner works about 10% of the time. Literally. Most of the time I press my "On Demand" button, I just get an error message. Pathetic.

@108Reliant:

In fairness, they spend $3.5 billion last year on infrastructure on their infrastructure.

High Availability appears to be a concept foreign to the folks at TWC. If they are going to offer a promotion for their VOD service, then it might have been a good idea to ensure that their networks also had capacity to grow. But that's just me (and the rest of consumerists) thinking like that.
Maybe since they couldn't grow their infrastructure so quickly, they could have just sent all their customers an electronic coupon good for a couple of free VOD movies (and good for let's say, 2 months so the demand is spread out).
For those of you who wish to read about high availability, you can do so here: [www.availabilitydigest.com]

@rekoil: No, the marketing people should be blamed, but several of the above posts seem to blame the network guys.

I have worked as a computer tech / network admin for years and cant count the times Ive have bosses and sales people make promises that were unrealistic and put me and my team under way too much stress, and then we look bad if it doesn't work out.

@nybiker: The VOD backend is built with some internal redundancies for fault tolerance, such as RAID and multiple power supplies. Stuff like parallel processing and failovers would be difficult to implement on VOD, which is already very complex. TWC could request it, but ultimately it would be up to the VOD vendors to create a viably-priced solution -- which may not yet be possible. As I said at 11:56 AM, it's unlikely this was a network capacity problem.

TWC LA uses some static and dynamic load balancing on the backend. In this case, it seems there was just not enough gross capacity to meet demand. Redundancy would not have helped.

@OggJoshua: Hmm, although if they were disabling only HD content, maybe it was a network capacity issue.

@Hoss: On Demand is Trademarked by In Demand, the production company behind the system. In Demand is owned by comcast, TW, cox, and almost everyone else in the industry!

@pmcpa2: [www.indemand.com]

I didn't even realize one could expect TWC's on-demand service to work at all. Badmouth Comcast all you want, but ever since moving down south I have been paying an extra $15 a month for a crippled service that's never available.

I'd drop the whole digital package, but...I can't give up the Investigation Discovery channel. I'm so ashamed.

If Comcast is anything like Cox, then here is my theory on what went wrong:

Cox's on-demand system places the movies and pay per view events on the sub-carriers of a channel. In other words, the same type of sub-channels you would find on a HD channel (4-1, 4-2, 4-3, etc.)

To find these stations, connect the cable straight into your HD tuner. Set the tuner to scan the cable channels (not off the air broadcasts). The tuner must be QAM capable - most are.

Because of the nature of the broadcasts, you may not find all of the channels being used. Many are only turned on when someone orders a movie. Weekend evenings are a good time to scan. Repeat a few times.

I used an HD Homerun to find many of the channels on cox.

In the case of Comcast, I suspect they simply ran out of channels due to demand.

@rbb: Just a word of warning, don't do that if you have kids around. I did that once before and while flipping through those channels, found some of the raunchiest porn I've ever seen.

@PLATTWORX: many years ago (5+ years) when we first got digital cable with time warner, we wanted to try to watch a movie on xmas eve, via TWC's movies on demand service... no dice. we called the service center, and we were told that due to high demand, they could not provide movies, and that we should just keep trying to access the movie that we had already paid for...
i can't remember the outcome though, i just remember having a shitty first experience.

@rbb: Do you mean TWC, in this case? They definitely could have exhausted their bandwidth in some service areas (geographic regions), but they wouldn't have run out of channel numbers to which to assign streams.

@t325: Yuckers! How recently did that happen? I would be surprised to hear of a cable company that did not encrypt its adult content streams today. In fact, many companies are encrypting all their non-free VOD streams now to prevent the kind of hack rbb describes.

Gee, mine Time Warner on Demand only works about 40% of the time anyway. I definitely would not have expected it to work during a big promotion.