Three minutes and forty seconds of high quality audio and video, then nothing. That�s just part of the story on WTP�s initial attempt to broadcast THE LIBERTY HOUR this past Tuesday night.

Here are the facts as we know them.

1) During the day Tuesday, in preparation of the WTP-TV broadcast, the broadcast server and software configurations were tested repeatedly and verified as functioning properly.

From the beginning of the broadcast at 9:30 PM Tuesday, many viewers experienced various problems receiving the broadcast stream. Exactly one minute after Bob Schulz completed saying the following words, the broadcast was completely disabled and knocked off the "air":

3) While the production continued in the studio, our service provider attempted to figure out why the broadcast was not going out.

4) While the number of people accessing the WTP website to watch the broadcast was very high in numbers, the problem was not a lack of adequate bandwidth capacity. THE LIBERTY HOUR�S access to the Internet is through dedicated server with a very large data communications backbone that can handle the throughput of over 1,000,000 users.

5) The problem was Time Warner.

6) Time Warner owns the node (a "junction box") through which pass the cables that our streaming provider renders its service. A node is comprised of hardware that manages the digital transmission of packets containing the sound and video of the broadcast. Corporations like Cisco manufacture the hardware that is used in nodes.

7) This particular node serves two large commercial multicast broadcast providers as well as a host of commercial T-1 data lines, residential cable customers, etc. Our broadcaster�s service is specifically enabled to support the "multicast" broadcast transmission protocol that was used to broadcast our program.

8) At 6 PM Tuesday, our web broadcaster received a message that was left on a telephone voice recording machine from someone who identified himself as Tony Garcia from Time Warner. The message was that Time Warner was experiencing a problem affecting just � and ONLY � the specific communications node in the local area that was to carry the broadcast. He further informed our broadcast provider that a "work order" had been issued for maintenance. Coincidentally, as we found out later -- the only part of the node affected turned out to be the part that supports the multicast digital transmission protocol we were using for our broadcast.

No other reason was given for the fact that Time Warner had deprived our provider the ability to broadcast in this mode. It appears there was no attempt made by Time Warner to coordinate their repair schedule with their other commercial customers on this node that were affected -- or to ascertain if their "maintenance" would interfere with the ongoing 24 hr/day commercial activities of our broadcaster.

9) Our broadcaster was not able to reconfigure the server or software in time to continue. Attempts to revive the broadcast ceased after 10 PM.

By early the next morning we had received more than 1,000 e-mails from people, informing us of their experiences while trying to access the website to watch the broadcast. We thank everyone who did so. It was very helpful.

Besides getting knocked off the air after three minutes and forty seconds, we have been informed by many people that during the first few minutes of the broadcast they had intermittent audio but no video, or video but no audio. This kind of problem is usually attributable to dial up connections with slower speed modems and older operating systems, but also could also have been directly caused by the hardware problems at the communications node.

Finally, We had reports from many people who said that when they went to our website, the entire page was filled with "gibberish." Here is a sample:

With some people, the gibberish would not be there when they re-booted their computer. With others, it was.

This problem seems to occur every time we have a major event. The last time it occurred was on November 14, 2002, which was the day of our live webcast of Freedom Drive 2002 from the National Mall in DC. Before that it occurred on April 8, 2002, which was the day of our live webcast of our press conference from the National Press Club in DC.

The technology experts tell us we have a "very sophisticated" hacker at work. Somebody is interested in limiting the number of people who can access our website at times of high importance to us. We are taking steps to prevent the problem from occurring in the future.

The "gibberish" computer attack appears to interact with Internet Explorer�s web page memory cache and certain system level settings on our GiveMeLiberty.org server. Usually, the effects of this attack can be alleviated by users by clearing out the temporary and history files in Internet Explorer. This is done by selecting "Tools"� "Internet Options" on I/E and then selecting the "Delete Temporary Files" and the "Clear History" options.

Now for some good news.

The initial production of THE LIBERTY HOUR was recorded and is now available. The show is 1hour and 23 minutes long. NOTE: future shows will be kept under 1 hour in length.

If you want, you can download the file directly to your hard drive (approximately 63 MB) so you can watch it off-line or copy it to a CD-ROM to distribute to your friends. Click Here to easily download the video file (via FTP) onto your PC.

We encourage everyone to watch the full broadcast of the January 7^th show and to tell others about it. Our next broadcast of THE LIBERTY HOUR will be on January 21, 2003 at 9:30 P.M. (Eastern), 6:30 P.M. (Pacific). After that, we intend to broadcast every Tuesday evening.

We apologize for the inconvenience we know many people experienced as a result of our problem with Time Warner and our hacker. We have taken the necessary steps to see that those problems do not occur again.