Quick note from me:
I'm currently on holiday so I'm not monitoring these forums or my emails. I did see the HUGE number of poor reviews in the Play Store last night though, as they come straight to my phone.
I haven't been told what last night's issue was yet, however it can't be the same issue as the previous event.
All I can provide is a little background information on why you're seeing the odd behaviour in the app (apologies for the lack of structure - there's only so much I can do on my phone):
The video feeds go in a number of different directions. One is a raw feed, which is sent to a team who are responsible for creating our clips and highlights. Another feed goes to our set top boxes. Another goes to our apps, which is processed into multiple different quality levels in many different formats, to work on all our different supported platforms. These streams can then be viewed either in standard player (direct to your devices) or in our enhanced player (provided by a 3rd party, where they manually add extra data to it, e.g. to separate the fights).
The enhanced player is least reliable and has poor error messages - "not available in your region". When an event goes wrong, the first thing we do is switch that off so that the more reliable standard player kicks in for everyone. When that doesn't work, we have to remove the event altogether and rely on the live channel (with no ability to pause or rewind the video) - this is when you then see it disappear from the app.
While the event is live, we save the stream that is going to the standard player. As soon as the event ends, that stored data becomes our replay - that's how replays are usually available in the app as soon they end.
If the standard player stream has failed for any reason, then we've also lost our ability to offer the replay. We can't get it back - if it's not stored when the event was live, then there won't be a replay. At this point, we then become reliant on the raw stream that was sent to the editors to create the highlights. We need to ask that team to manually create a longer highlight, which takes a few hours.
Someone asked why the error messages blame the internet connection - this is because that's that usual cause of issues. All the app knows is that it's trying to download the video, but it's failing to get a response (if it got a bad response, the standard player would show a better error message). This looks the same as when your internet connection has dropped out.
So that's where we are - the recording (which is all automated) has failed, so the normal replay can't be offered. Manual clips (or full fights) will be uploaded as soon as they become available from our editors (this was within hours after the previous failure).
As mentioned, I don't know the cause of the failure this time but it definitely won't be the same as last time. It's unfortunate that it's affected UFC again - just bad luck with events happening at a horrible time of night.
One of the mods may offer more information later. If not, I'll see if I can offer any more insight/assurance when I'm back on Apr 24th.
