Bright Canopy, the company behind running Second Life (and OpenSim) in a web browser, recently announced that they were ready for launch. An inital price of $17.00 a month was announced, with an advisory that this may change if demand exceeded expectations.
Linden Lab then blogged about the service :
This weekend, an exciting new service is launching: Bright Canopy. With Bright Canopy, you can use either the official Second Life Viewer or the Firestorm Viewer to access Second Life in your web browser, and you can enjoy great performance and graphics, without a high-spec PC.
Customers flocked to the ship on the ocean, sailing with an inventory of love and devotion for the bold new product. Alas, it quickly became apparent to the Bright Canopy that customers weren’t just going to rock the boat, they were going to tip the boat over. This was of course not the desired outcome, forcing the Bright Canopy team to blog; We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat :
We’ve had so much response that we are going to have to make a change and offer a different plan to make sure we are sustainable and can be around long enough to take advantage of much more affordable hosting options from Frame in a few months.
New signups were put on hold and Bright Canopy were transparent about what had happened :
We burned through our contingency in a few hours. We tried modifying some things, but it just wasn’t something that could be fixed with a knob. We talked over our options and looked at the numbers. In order to be able to offer a service of any sort, we knew we would have to make changes.
There will be a limited time offer of a $10 credit for the first month, meaning the first month will be $7. This is our way of thanking you for bearing with us. This offer expires 12AM SLT on Sunday, September 6th. After that, each month will be $17. The plan comes with 20 hours, and additional time is available for $0.013 per minute.
This isn’t what we planned, and making the change is hard, but we believe it is the only way to keep this service available for the people who need it.
One thing was very clear, there was a larger demand for this service than had been anticipated.
Hamlet Au over at New World Notes, blogged on the subject and said :
So looks like there’s a hunger for this service, if it can only scale. The company is currently not accepting new subscribers while they rejigger things,
Inara Pey also blogged on the subject and Inara’s post is choc full of details on what has happened :
While there were the inevitable hiccups which tend to accompany such launches, it was the overall demand which perhaps caused the fledgling company the most problems. So much so, that Bright Canopy have been forced to revise their subscription model, and suspend the service while they do so.
That new subscription model is one that people need to pay attention to :
- From Sunday, September 6th, those signing-up to the service will be charged $17.00 a month for up to 20 hours of use. Additional time will be charged at $0.013 per minute.
- From now until 12:00 am on Sunday, September 6th, those who signed up for the service will be charged $7.00 for 20 hours, then at the $0.013 per minute.
- All existing subscriptions have been cancelled, and all existing users will need to subscribe to the new plan once the door is open to subscriptions once more.
An experience like this, at launch is bound to make some customers think twice about subscribing again. Another issue to note is that the new pricing model is clearly not as attractive as the original one was, even though that original price point was higher than that of SL Go from OnLive. Inara states in her blog post :
As noted earlier in this article, Bright Canopy hope the new plan will be an interim measure. The problem here of course is that 20 hours + $0.013 a minute isn’t going to be that attractive an offering to users – something Bright Canopy is all too aware of. With many users spending tens of hours a week in-world, the additional costs could easily mount up, and so people are understandably going to be more focused on the potential for additional costs than on the potential for improved pricing down the road.
The challenge therefore that now stands in front of Bright Canopy, the cloud platform Frame and Amazon’s spot instances is that of getting a product that meets the needs of people at a price that they feel comfortable with. An important point to note here is that it appears that people will happily pay a flat subscription fee, it’s the by the minute fees that give people the heebie jeebies. The really important thing to note here is that it’s likely people will pick a subscription price that may well be higher than their by the minute usage would be, but they are comfortable with the knowledge of how much those subscription prices will be.
Can Bright Canopy, Frame and Amazon make this work? Time will tell, but it’s now abundantly clear that demand for such services is most definitely there. Sony dropped the ball on this one when they hid OnLive’s technology in the Sony cupboard.
Please do read Inara Pey’s post for a more detailed explanation of events, services and comments from Bill Glover of Bright Canopy.
There is another factor at work here as well, which I managed to forget mentioning in my article – and that’s the Firestorm effect.
In bringing SL Go on stream, OnLive focused on the official viewer. As we know, this has a far lower user uptake than Firestorm; thus the company had the advantage of being able to tweak and fiddle with things without the risk and any large-scale upset. By starting with Firestorm, Bright Canopy was looking to support as many users as it could – which is a good thing – but it also meant the risks and problems could be greatly magnified should demand get out of control, with the potential for greater reticence on people’s part to re-try the service once things have settled down again.
Given this is completely untried territory for any company to venture into, I do hope that people are prepared to be forgiving of the initial hiccups and allow Bright Canopy to recover and move forward again. What they have achieved so far is quite extraordinary.
Yup, good point about Firestorm, OnLive were excited about the Firestorm link and it was great to have an option on viewers.