Hak.5 update

Posted on August 3rd, 2005 | by admin |

Ok, I know I haven’t updated the site in a while and that’s because we have all been so busy with the show.

First off the final render was completed last Thursday or Friday.

Then on Saturday I called up Leo Laporte on his radio show on KFI AM640 in L.A. to ask about bandwidth. We’re really concerned about getting hit with a $4,000 bandwidth bill and having to close up shop. He suggested Google Video, OurMedia.org, Coral Cache, and Bit Torrent.

Then Sunday I sent out a sneak preview and request for feedback to the people at commandN, WASD.tv, OpenAlpha.tv, Leo Laporte, and From the Shadows. I heard back from all but two of them and I’ve got to say the feedback from the preview release was really good. I wanted to send it to the guys at Revision 3, including Dan and Kevin, but I couldn’t find an email address for them to save my life.

Then Tuesday I got an email from Jon saying that he posted us to Digg. The headline read that the pilot was out but that’s because Jon didn’t know the terminology and thought the trailer was the pilot. I should have figured when he kept mentioning “when the final pilot comes out”. Anyway, we hit Digg at about 1, and within an hour have 20 diggs. I was worried for a while that we wouldn’t make front page and nobody would care, but to my suprise we did, and once it got homepage it climbed. Last count was 501 diggs, it was amazing. We got a lot of feedback in the comments, did a couple thousand hits on the site, got a bunch of registered users on the forums and newsletter, and mostly just ignored the “haters”.

Here it is Wednesday and I need to get the BlogTorrent software up there or we’re totally going to be no-go for liftoff Friday. I still haven’t decided when we should post to digg about the official release. I figured we should post just to get the headline right. Hell, maybe it’ll even dupe. :)

As long as these coral caches hold together, and the blog torrent software doesn’t get taken down by the ISP, who has been wishy-washy on Bit Torrent support, we’ll be ok. We’ve got 3 sites with a total of 400 GB bandwidth. With a 200 MB episode we should be able to handle 2000 direct downloads, not including what the coral caches do, and the torrents.

Unfortunately the bandwidth stats on the ISP aren’t real time, so I won’t have any metrics until Saturday. By then we could have gone over our limit by gigabytes, and at $1/GB overage it could rack up. Then on top of that the podcast for last Saturday’s KFI AM640 show will be released this Saturday and we could get even more traffic from podcast listeners.

I need to make it perfectly clear that I’m not complaining about all the hits, the more the better. I’m thrilled that so many people are interested in the show. I’m just hoping that our ISP can handle it. I guess this is our first test.

My other concern is that Hak.5 viewers will check the whois records on hak5.org, hack5.org, or hak5.tv and see Darren Kitchen, put two and two together, and find this domain. If that’s the case our little game of six might be over. I hope not. It may have slowed down but it’s a lot of fun.

  1. 2 Responses to “Hak.5 update”

  2. By Karen on Aug 5, 2005 | Reply

    A heartfelt MAZEL TOV! to the entire cast and crew!

  3. By Alz on Aug 5, 2005 | Reply

    Why would the game be over???
    it’s ours!!

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Hak.5 Update

Posted on July 23rd, 2005 | by admin |

I haven’t been on DKnet for a while as Wess and I have been busy working on our debut IPTV show, Hak.5 (Hack point five). We’re wrapping up the pilot episode and hope to beta release here on DKnet this weekend. We’ve had to re-do a lot of shoots. TIP: What seems to look like a good segment after 6-7 beers ends up being mindless ramblings in the morning sober. If I get motivated I might release a quick “trailer” of the show tonight.