We were aware that it would be impossible to make a bug-free launch, that’s why we had decided to start slowly. After sending the first hundreds of invites — and we are happy to say that those invites turned into users in 100% of the cases — we started to deal with the first real consumers/uploaders/seeders. They were the first to interact with our UI and we’ve challenge our core technology by letting them upload videos and deposit $flixx. After a week of testing and debugging, these are some of the first impressions, both on the user and on the development sides.

Users are quickly understanding how the platform works, everything seems to be friendly and intuitive. Even though we would have loved to have more time to further develop the design and the UI, as we keep debugging the app we are hands on with those details, taking into consideration the improvement suggested of our early testers.

We are facing a lot of problems when videos start to queue for moderation. When uploading, videos first are encoded on the client side, then sent to our seedboxes. Moderators are able to connect to the seedboxes and stream the videos from there to sneak a peek and approve or reject. But it was not possible for all users to reach the seedboxes on one hand because of restrictions on their internet connections, on the other hand because of a confusing user experience — uploaders thought their videos were uploaded when they actually were only encoded. While the UX part is being quickly corrected we are still assessing the technical problems that users may face when uploading content — one solution may be to upload the videos to our seedboxes using an HTTP connection instead of BitTorrent’s protocol.

We’ve been working to stabilize and improve our seedboxes — 8 in total — to be able to scale — up and down — depending on traffic and amount of seeders of each video. By using seedboxes we’ve assured a seamless streaming and quick reproduction times for the videos on the app.

We’ve started injecting some $flixx into the platform to fuel the economy, as a reward for users who decided to be served with advertising. We’ve started slowly as well, and advertisement has been paying a peak of 1.6 $flixx per play. We expect this number to decrease a little bit as we invite new users to the platform and, at the same pace, we inject more amounts of $flixx into Flixxo’s economy. The reward decreases globally and individually as there is a bigger demand for advertising. When a user gets paid, his/her reward halves for the next ad, and after a while it doubles again, floating between certain limits.

$flixx deposits were opened this week. Some users decided to put small amounts of their tokens into the app, and there were no problems at all on this matter. We had some users asking for withdrawals but, as this is not automatic at this stage and we need all our resources focused on the development, withdrawals may take some time to execute.

What’s next?

We will be having a more stable version of the app by the end of the week and we will invite a small second tier of users starting on Monday. This version will include an automatic message when a newer version is available and hopefully will fix some of the uploading issues — definitely those who are related to the UX. We don’t expect to have significant changes in the UI until the following version. We will notify the community as new invites are being sent and we expect to start quickly and scale fast.

We want to thank you for your patience when it comes to waiting a little bit more to experience the platform, and show our gratitude to those who are actively reporting bugs and uploading videos.