Site speed improvement
Brian Butterworth published on UK Free TV Whilst reading Speed on a budget - how Media UK hosts our website, I noted that one of the speed improvements was managed by using a AWS Free Usage Tier to host the site's static graphics.
For some years, the graphics for UK Free TV have been hosted in the freeview.tv domain, which has a different IP address from ukfree.tv, which allows the web browser to maintain connection and stops the unnecessary transfer of cookies to the graphics site.
However, ukfree.tv and freeview.tv are actually hosted on the same machine; this means the load had to be shared: this was resulting in page loading times of several seconds at times.
I have now moved the graphics web-server (called img.freeview.tv) to the AWS service, and this has reduced the load on the main ukfree.tv server, leading to page load times of less than one second.
I hope this speed increase makes ukfree.tv a better experience.
Hope it works for you!
I ought to mention that Media UK doesn't use a free usage tier: we've much too much traffic for that... ;)
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James Cridland: Yes, it seems to be working well.
Actually, I've been looking at the amount of traffic and I can't see it being less than the 15GB a month out limit - it's been 4.6 GB since I set it up yesterday.
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Mind you, I think at $0.120 per GB, it is probably quite affordable...
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8:36 PM
Regarding Waltham transmitter, this has been a "heap" since it was built and the mast fell down.
Freeview - is now a major problem with some viewers since full power started freeview boxes crash due to now two strong signals are received ie. Waltham and Belmont.
Why are many channels still on low power ?
Picture quality is very poor compared with analogue and no doubt will reduce further when HD starts. This change over was not planned and tested why ? you are trying to sort out the mess but without any luck.
Why are there intermittant loss of sound (on all channels and on different TV's and different freeview boxes in different locations.Freeview NEVER reply to complaints.
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Mr P Watmough: To answer some of your questions.
Waltham is in the first stange of switchover, the rest of the multiplexes are at full power from the second stage, Wednesday 31st August 2011.
Belmont has completed switchover.
Please see Digital Region Overlap | ukfree.tv - independent free digital TV advice for details of overlapping regions.
The picture quality will not change because of the HD service, those services are on a separate multiplex.
The switchover was fully planned and tested over the last several years, it is rather an insult to suggest otherwise.
I'm not surprised that Freeview do not reply, they are a marketing service for the set-top boxes, and do not have any part in the transmissions.
If you have too strong a signal, your equipment will fail. Remove any boosters or amplifiers from your system if this is the case, if you have none, fit an attenuator, they cost about a fiver.
It is not possible to be more specific as your not provided your full postcode.
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