For the last few days I’ve been trying to help a friend troubleshoot video playback issues on their website. It’s a membership website that uses AWS to deliver videos.
A member in South America is having trouble viewing content so I offered my help & expertise to troubleshoot the problem.
Initially the user reported not being able to view video content so I thought it must be a problem with the content delivery network. After a lot of reading about the ins and outs of AWS I was still none the wiser about how or why only this member seems to be experiencing problems.
The member is adamant that it’s not their ISP as they’re having problems on many devices and browsers. To me, this sounds very much like a problem at the ISP or network level – so theoretically out of the scope for website troubleshooting, but given that they are a customer of my friend’s website I don’t want to rule any possibility out!
I remembered the awesome web troubleshooting tool that is https://www.whatismybrowser.com/ which will hopefully provide some more clues as to the members environment.
When involved in a troubleshooting exercise, it’s beneficial if the user doesn’t stress how technical they are as it can change the mindset of the troubleshooter. This can be beneficial or detrimental to solving the problem; if the user expresses their technical expertise then we (as troubleshooters) assume they know what we know which can waylay the process. It’s far easier to make no assumptions on the user’s part both for technical solutions and our choice of language.
It’s an interesting problem that is still being sorted out, hopefully we can work out what and/or where the problem lies.