WorldTV

This is a cool feature and one we’re launching months ahead of schedule to make video discovery with WorldTV even more useful and powerful.

Starting today there is a new ‘Suggested Videos’ tab within the WorldTV Editor that examines your library and makes suggestions for new video clips you might like.

The new feature takes advantage of YouTube’s related videos function and examines your Library for YouTube clips. If it finds 2 or more YouTube clips in your Library, it fetches related videos from YouTube, and displays them in the new Suggested Videos tab. If you don’t have any YouTube video clips in your Library, the tab will not appear.

Up to 50 clips are suggested and it takes a few seconds to generate them. For now we are doing the work ‘on demand’ rather than in the background. We plan to speed this up in future.

You can drag single or multiple selected clips to your Library, just like the YouTube Top 25 videos tab. A new feature for both tabs means that a green tick will display over the thumbnail for any clips you have added to your Library. This is to provide useful visual feedback of which clips you’ve added and which you haven’t.

There is a small refresh button at the bottom of the new tab which will fetch a new set of suggested video clips.

In other news we have updated the ‘Create Channel Wizard’. The main improvements are an improved automatic logo generation feature and bringing the video player (on the demo screen) up to date with our latest player.

Please let us know what you think of the new features in the comments, and don’t forget you can always vote on new features you’d like to see on our feedback pages.

Alongside today’s raft of new features for the World Page, we’re also releasing a new, related feature for the Editor.

Starting today, a new YouTube Tab within the Editor will show you a live list of the Top 25 YouTube clips for the country of your channel. You can drag these clips to your Library or straight to the Playlist. This is a great way to quickly add fresh YouTube content to your channel.

If you don’t like the feature you can easily disable it.  Simply click the close icon to delete the tab. It can be turned back on again within Channel Settings -> Editor. We currently support 23 countries for this feature.

A significant ramification is we’ve now developed the framework to be able to add ‘live content’ tabs to the Editor, and (what was much harder to do) allow content in one tab to be dragged and dropped easily to another. The new system even supports multiple clip dragging (using shift-select) and we are excited about the new features we’ll be able to build with this.

Features we have planned for ‘Live Tabs’ include…

• Add any WorldTV Channel as a Live Tab source
• Add any WorldTV Library as a Live Tab source (if you own or operate it)
• Add a YouTube channel as a Live Tab source
• Add any video RSS feed as a Live Tab source

We will work to add these exciting new features as soon as possible.

It’s been a long time since we’ve been this excited about an update to the site. But excited we are, and we hope your excitement will follow.

The World Page has been long overdue for an upgrade, but today it gets 3 major new features…

Search
Lightbox
Top YouTube Clips

Search

Sometimes the simplest things in life are the hardest, and SEARCH is a feature that many of you have been asking for, and one we’ve wanted to add since the beginning. Up until now it has not been possible to search WorldTV channels. All that has now changed.

Our new search engine is powered by Google, and searches all of the public channels of WorldTV in the blink of an eye. Super fast, super easy, just like you would expect from Google. Try out the new WorldTV Channel search

Lightbox / Improved UI – Dim the Lights!

In the past, when you clicked on a channel on the World Page it would open in a pop-up window. We never really liked that very much. Starting today, videos on the World Page will open in a TV-style lightbox. You can navigate between the top channels without having to close the lightbox. Try it!

Top YouTube Clips

In addition to showing the Top WorldTV channels for a particular country, we now show the top YouTube clips as well. By clicking on the World map you can see the top YouTube clips for different countries. We’re doing this for 23 countries with more to come. By clicking on ‘World’ (the breadcrumb navigation at the top) you can see the top YouTube clips for the whole world.