Screencast.com - Update on Thumbnails

Edit Subject

What's Happening?
The recent Screencast.com outage on March 15, 2012 caused by hardware failure at one of our data centers, resulted in a significant service interruption. We were able to get backup hardware in place, and customer content restored by the early hours of March 16, but the site was not considered fully functional until March 17. However, some thumbnail images which appear in your Library, Folder, or Playlist views are not yet fully restored. Content that was uploaded between the 4th and 15th of March *may* still have default (orange colored) icons associated with them. Here’s a screenshot of what you might be seeing:

What's the Impact?
The impact to you and other TechSmith customers depends on how you use Screencast.com. For example, Jing users will probably see no impact, because they send their viewers a direct link (URL) to the view page of the content they’re sharing. If you’ve shared a URL to an entire Folder or Playlist, your viewers may see a default thumbnail image in place of a normal one, if the content was uploaded between 3/4 and 3/15, and depending on whether or not its thumbnail has been restored. Likewise, if you embedded a MediaRoll into a blog post or webpage, and the content was uploaded between 3/4 and 3/15, you may see default thumbnails until they are restored. Keep in mind, this will in no way impact the actual playback of a video or image once the viewer clicks on the icon to see the actual content.

What's Next?
We are in the process of restoring these thumbnail images, but we need to do so with care so as to not erase custom thumbnail images that customers have associated with this content. At the current rate of restoration, all thumbnail images will be restored within the next 19 days. I wish we could tell how many customers are affected by this inconvenience. If you cannot wait for the restoration process to be completed, we have this tutorial in our Help Center that will tell you how to upload a custom thumbnail image in place of the default one. If you do upload a custom thumbnail, our restoration process will NOT write over your new thumbnail with the “old” one being restored.

As always, if you need any technical assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us through our Technical Support Channel. I again apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our customers and I want to assure you we are taking these issues very seriously.

Dirk Frazier
Product Manager
Cloud Services
TechSmith Corporation