For some days
www.uctv.fm has been down. When I try to access it I am told:
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Call me cynical, but I find it challenging to believe there is a capacity problem, in the sense of too many viewers.
So could it be maintenance? It would be a clumsy way to treat users, but perhaps this maintenance is the upgrade of uctv.fm promised for so long and so frequently?
Let's hope so. After all, uctv.fm is critical to GCN's earning of revenue. Here are the most recent examples.
We were told on 22 Nov:
Our IPTV platform uctv.fm has been developed over a number of years. The global audience reach of uctv.fm exceeds 100 million households not including smartphone and desktop. Having established this substantial IPTV distribution infrastructure, we are carefully considering our options of how best to monetise uctv.fm with the appropriate risk/reward ratio including licensing the infrastructure to third parties. We will make a firm decision on the monetisation strategy in the next 4 weeks.
On 30th Jan we were told:
The Company is continuing to develop its IPTV platform uctv.fm to generate new revenue by adding pay per view content to be distributed around the world including the China market. Go Zhongshe will be able to facilitate the introduction of Western entertainment pay per view entertainment content into China for uctv.fm on multiple platforms particularly on smartphones.
Is this down time the long awaited upgrade of uctv.fm? Or is it a serious failure to have a server backup? If the latter, then eager viewers and 'monetisers' will be mighty disappointed.
I also see that uctv.fm's Undercover channel is similarly down. Centurion recently paid the mammoth total of 16.67 million P1 shares to GCN for use of that music portal. If Centurion asked for those shares back then they would be no loss to GCN, in my view. The attempts of P1 to list seem as dead as uctv.fm is at this moment.
