An Update on Viewership Issues
2 min readDec 8, 2016
We’d like to provide an update to the Tweet regarding some of the questions around viewership numbers. Here are a few updates to what we believe may have been causing the discrepancies for some members of our community:
- We discovered a bug, with the help of our community members, caused by the Twitter for Android TV app (launched on November 15). This resulted in incorrectly reporting more than one viewer per actual viewer. We believe the impact of this bug was infrequent, because it was limited to broadcasts where a Twitter for Android TV viewer watched a broadcast that appeared on the global feed. We’ve calculated that the number of broadcasts this affected is 0.3% of our broadcasts since November 15. The issue has been fixed and an update to the Google Play Store will ship in the next few days. In the meantime, we’ve updated our API as of December 7 to discount viewers from Twitter for Android TV from counting towards viewership numbers. Although this will result in some undercounting of Twitter for Android TV viewers, we think this is the right tradeoff considering the extent of the impact when the bug occurs.
- We had an outage window this weekend that resulted in, among other things, viewership numbers behaving strangely during the period of time our service issues were occurring. These outages happen infrequently, but when they do happen, we send proactive updates from @periscopehelp. We’re working on making our infrastructure more resilient to these types of scaling issues.
- We’ve found a few minor edge cases when people are watching on Periscope.tv and Periscope for Android where there can be a delay in reporting when viewers leave the broadcast. We’re actively working to resolve these issues, but we are confident that the probability of occurrence and the impact when they occur is negligible.
You can learn more about how we track viewership metrics on our Help Center.
