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submit button on your 'contact support' page does NOT work.

I'm a premium member and I've tried getting in touch with your support team in both Chrome and Firefox on Windows PC, and the 'submit' button doesn't submit the form. I'm selecting "my account or a payment" and then "other".

This is the page not submitting: https://support.jwplayer.com/customer/portal/emails/new

PLEASE FIX, THIS IS RIDICULOUS.

As it is, I'll just post my complaint publicly:

SUBJECT: Premium version doesn't do what I was led to believe by sales guy on the phone.

invoice #87652

MESSAGE:
I bought the premium version for $299 to try out the HLS streaming. I talked to a sales rep on the phone, and he told me I'd need the Premium version to test the HLS.

After testing and going through the support forums, I discovered that you guys only support HLS on Flash. But Firefox is getting rid of flash soon, and flash isn't supported on mobile. Yet in the support forums you guys say you don't support HTML5 and HLS in browsers such as Firefox and IE. It took a lot of digging to finally figure out why the HLS streaming wasn't working... because it's not really supported yet! https://goo.gl/7hN7v0

MetaCafe and YouTube have supported HTML5 HLS for a long while now, so when I was told that JWplayer Premium supported HLS over the phone, I just took your guys word for it.

It would be nice if you guys offered a trial month with HLS featured, so it can be tried out. Right now it's a "bait and switch". I have to sign up $300 to even test the feature, to find out that it's actually severely crippled.

I understand that I can specify a "fallback" that is not HLS, but that doesn't solve the problem.

I would like to look at your Premium solution again later and reconsider if these issues have been resolved. But for now, please refund me the remaining 11 months, this service doesn't deliver and it's quite disappointing. I'm happy to pay for the first month, even though I used it just a week before discovering the limitations.

UPDATE: it's further frustrating that your regular contact support page is broken, and I have to air the grievance publicly.

4 Community Answers

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Alex

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

Hi there,

Please accept our apologies regarding the issues with our support form. It did only affect those customers choosing “Account” as their topic and the issue has since been fixed yesterday.

As for your question regarding the product, whether or not Flash is required to playback HLS streams is completely dependent on what browser you are viewing it on. We do have a Media Format Reference support article that lists the browsers our player supports and whether or not HLS will play via HTML5 or Flash in those browsers. As of right now, here is what browser support for HLS looks like in specific browsers:

HTML5
Safari (for iOS and Mac)
Microsoft Edge
Chrome (for Android)
Chrome (for Mac and Windows) – using JW Player 7.4.2, or higher, and by either enabling the option in the cloud-hosted player configuration, or by adding “hlshtml: true” to your embed code

Flash
Firefox
IE 9 through 11

With the upcoming release of JW Player 7.6, we are planning on introducing functionality to be able to render HLS in HTML5 in Firefox and IE 11 in Windows 8.1, or higher. HLS is not natively supported in these browsers, which is why we have to build this feature ourselves and it takes a lot of work and testing to make it happen. It was the same situation in Chrome for desktop until we released the feature in JW Player 7.4.2. We chose to focus on Chrome first due to its large market share in browser usage.

I do also apologize that you felt forced to purchase a subscription to the Premium account in order to test your HLS stream. We do offer a Stream Tester for this exact reason so I am not sure why the sales person did not point you in that direction to test our your streams in various browsers.

Honestly, I am disappointed that you weren’t better informed of our Stream Tester or of our documentation regarding browser support and I do hope you accept my apology on behalf of the company. Customers simply should not be made to feel the way you are feeling right now. I hope what I have told you gives you a better understanding of our current support for HLS in HTML5. In the meantime, I am going to forward this inquiry to my colleague, Aja, who will be happy to refund the $299 you paid for the Premium account. You should be hearing from her shortly.

Thank you.

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Alex

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

Hi,

My colleague on the billing team just advised me that she has processed the refund of your $299 charge for the Premium subscription and you should expect it to be credited to your payment method in 3-5 business days.

Thank you!

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Elven

User  
0 rated :

Thanks for the refund and excellent customer service. I'll use the stream tester at this point from now on and sign up again in the future when I have the configuration I want to use more sorted out.

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Alex

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

Not a problem!

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