It never ceases to amaze me.
You can have a multimillion dollar media company with production
resources second to none and they'll still cheap out on the IT department. Case in point, the 2013 Speed Channel Fantasy
Bid webpage for the Barrett-Jackson auction coverage.
Now I know it's just a webpage but it's one of the primary
promotional vehicles (pardon the pun) for Speed's auction coverage. They've offered the online fantasy bid for
most of the past decade so you'd expect they'd have all the wrinkles out by
now. At least you'd think so...
It seems this year something's gone wrong. In prior years 10s of thousands of fantasy
bids from auction fans were handled without incident. This year during the Thursday and Friday
broadcast the system frequently failed with a fraction of that number. Friday and Saturday are high viewership days
but the problem started almost immediately upon the start of the Fantasy Bids
on Thursday.
If it were just a vanity contest it wouldn't be a big deal
but the Hagerty Fantasy bid offers multiple tiers of prize offerings with a
grand prize of a new Shelby Mustang.
That makes it a contest which suddenly makes easy participation
paramount. Considering you're forced to
opt-in to sales communications to play there is an effective transaction of
sorts. That means players have the right
to expect to access to the game in exchange for extra spam in their inbox. An expectation not met acknowledged by a
popup once I was finally able to log in on Friday.
Remember, I'm an IT guy so I have some idea about web
servers and capacity planning. That
said, my assessment is that they've either outsourced the back end processing
for the game or they've made a major change that nobody bothered to load test.
Either way it smacks of poor planning, inadequate resources and
incompetent IT personnel. Which is
exactly the results you can expect when you go with the lowest bidder. Results not price is the real definition of a
good value in anything.
For 2013 is appears Speed is getting exactly what it's paid
for.
