LiveRC RVA (Race Video Archive) is Back

We have some great news! LiveRC's RVA (Race Video Archive) is back in action and fully operational!

As many of you have noticed, the RVA system has been severely backlogged due to some limitations imposed by YouTube. As of March 1, 2020, YouTube restricted its automated uploads of videos to a limit of 5 per day. We tried to get this limitation increased via numerous emails, phone calls, and online requests, but we had very little success. We were able to get the limit raised on 3 different occasions, but only 5 videos at a time. This left us only able to upload 20 new videos per day, when we had been averaging over 500 per day on popular race nights. Eventually, it was evident that YouTube was no longer going to be a viable option to host RVA due to the sheer number of videos that are uploaded. To date, our RVA system has amassed over 750,000 videos on our YouTube channel, and counting. Finding a replacement solution for that volume of videos is no easy task.

Today, we are happy to announce that RVA is back in action! After exploring all options and other video hosting providers, we have determined that the best option was to move RVA into our own custom built cloud hosted solution. While YouTube was great while it lasted, they simply are not interested in this working with us with this capacity of videos.

Since March, we have been doing our best to store as many videos as possible until a new solution became available. We were able to save over 10,000 videos, but unfortunately, hard drive constraints on the RVA server forced some videos to be deleted and lost. We apologize for this, but are also happy that we were able to save as many as we did and get them all uploaded to the new RVA platform.

With the launch of this new platform and the cost of hosting hundreds of thousands of new videos each year, we will be moving RVA to be a feature reserved for Bonus Lap members in the near future. This will cover the cost of maintaining the system going forward. Additionally, if a video goes 60+ days with no views, it will be moved to an offline long term storage solution. If you ever want to view these videos, there will be an option to automatically pull this video from the archives and make it available for online viewing. This process will take about 12 hours to complete, and you will be notified once it becomes available online. After 60+ consecutive days of no further views, the video will go back to offline long term storage.

Although this has been a huge undertaking, we are happy to have RVA back online and we hope you enjoy it!