I just got a phone call from a Dreamhost tech support agent, yes, an actual telephone call with a human voice. The tech asked me if I received their notification that they were about to turn off their QuickTime Streaming Server. She said they sent out an email a month ago, but I never got it. Well this is horrible news. I chose Dreamhost for my website only because they supported QTSS at a reasonable price. I even stuck with them when they broke their server and it took me weeks to get through to the guy who could fix it. The tech said that QTSS had not been upgraded for years and they could not perform security updates to the OS on their servers. I don't believe it. QTSS is written in Perl and there is no reason why it would break with an OS upgrade.
I don't know what I'm going to do now. The agent said suggested I convert to Flash video. No way. QTSS isn't supported on iPhones and iOS devices, and neither is Flash. I'm not going to convert to another dead format like Flash. I could migrate to another web host, but the monthly fee for QTSS alone will be more than what I pay Dreamhost in a year. I will probably have to convert to HTTP Live Streaming, but it's going to take a while to get that running. So in the meantime, all my video content is offline.
It is worth noting that my BlogTV service was the first video blog on the internet. Other people used video on their websites, but I was the first person to use streaming services that integrated with standard blog software. It is starting to look like that blog software, MovableType, is also heading for obsolescence. I suppose this is the disadvantage to maintaining a site for so long. I have tried to keep everything online, and I'm even attempting to resurrect some of my first web pages from the early 1990s. It is easy to support legacy content written for simple standards like HTTP 1.0. But it's increasingly difficult to maintain some of the more complex, server-side systems. I suppose Dreamhost isn't to blame for the obsolescences of QTSS. But it doesn't really cost them anything to keep it running. And I paid them a hell of a lot of money over the years. I expected more from them and they've disappointed me before.
