RoadshowThree years ago, way back in June, 2011, we were proud to introduce our first iOS product, Roadshow. Today, I removed Roadshow from the App Store.
The specific reason for pulling Roadshow is that it is incompatible with the just-released iOS 8. It will still save videos and play them back offline — Roadshow’s reason for being — but the delete video feature no longer works, and that is a fatal flaw. It would be ridiculous to use Roadshow to save videos to watch later, and then have no way to delete them short of deleting the entire app.
That said, this day has been coming for some time. We had high hopes for Roadshow, and I've loved hearing from customers who put it to an astonishing variety of uses. But the reality was that it never worked as a business. It brought in less than $9,000 in revenue over three years, which did not come close to covering the initial development costs (three people working for 9 months). Without any prospect of revenue growth we could not justify further development, and over time its utility declined. One by one a number of major web video sites (e.g. Vimeo) made changes that broke Roadshow’s ability to save their videos.
I am grateful to everyone who gave Roadshow a try, mentioned it to friends, and wrote reviews. It was exciting to work on a very different sort of app, and fun to be able to watch videos as part of our jobs. We’re very busy working on Fetch these days, but someday I hope to return to iOS.
Loved roadshow – I hope you can consider resurrection, hence I am not upgrading yet to iOS 8
Is there another you recommend ?
Thanks! You might try Watchlater, or search in the App Store for “video download” — there are quite a few options.
Have you thought of releasing the program as open source and allowing the community to maintain it for you?
No, I actually hadn’t thought much about that option. Thanks for bringing it up. I’m not sure it would do the community a lot of good, since at this point the source code is several iOS releases out of date. But I will think about it — thanks.
Sorry to read that roadshow is no longer working on IOS 8. Is there any way how I can transfer my downloaded videos to another download app or to my pc?
Thanks
There isn’t an easy way to get the videos. If you make an unencrypted backup of your iPad, you may be able to then extract the saved .mp4 video files using an iPhone backup extraction utility, but it’s something I haven’t tried myself.
i have postponed updating my iPad in order to retain functionality as well. If anyone has checked to see if it works in iOS 9, please let me know!
Thanks
Roadshow does not work any better in iOS 9 than in iOS 8, unfortunately.