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.

It’s a new year, a new decade, and we’re really excited about what lies in store for WorldTV. It’s going to be a great year, and you’re going to love what we have planned!

First off, a couple of news items to share with you…

Editor Synchronisation

Some of you may have heard of Google WAVE, a new technology that lets people collaborate on the same document at the same time. In a similar way we have re-written the underlying technology used by our Editor to communicate with the WorldTV servers. Now when you make updates to the Editor it will automatically push those updates to any other Editors accessing the same channel. To put it another way, you can have two people accessing the same Editor, from different places in the world, at the same time. Updates by one will reflect on the other’s screen within seconds. It’s kind of geeky, but cool. Try it out!

SXSW

South by Southwest is a massive conference and festival that takes place each year in Austin, Texas for the music, film and digital industries. We’re excited to announce that WorldTV has been selected as one of 39 companies to attend the event as part of a UK Govt trade mission. The event runs from March 12-16.

Our Plans for 2010

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been asking you to tell us what features you would like to see on WorldTV, and to vote on other people’s ideas. We’ve decided to extend this until the end of January, so you still have time to cast your votes.

The features that are currently getting the most votes, and/or which are now on our shortlist are…

• Live broadcasting
• Homepage for channels
• Scheduling system / WorldTV time / Multiple playlists (build schedules of programs like real TV)
• Search for channels (on the World page)
• New and improved player designs
• Improved channel recommendation system (on the EPG)
• Weekly e-mails / awards system
• Channel genres / categorization (music, culture, sport etc)

Our shortlist is actually quite long (over 100 ideas for features) but these are the main ones. If you’ve not done so already head over to our feedback forum to place your votes!

We are absolutely delighted to announce two superb new additions to our supported sites. Both sites are on the entertainment side of things and have been around a while. The first is Heavy.com, one of the internet’s leading entertainment brands for men which was founded back in 1999.  Heavy produce their own shows and also feature other shows from different sources. They organize these shows in handy sections: Comedy, Movies, Action, Sports, Music and Style. Some of Heavy’s awesome original programming staples include “The Massive Mating Game,” “Superficial Friends,” “Kung Fu Jimmy Chow,” “Behind the Music that Sucks,” and “The Burly Sports Show.”
Our second new supported site is the always hilarious CollegeHumor. This site has been around for over 10 years, having also been founded back in 1999. They are the self-proclaimed #1 comedy site on the internet and showcase funny original videos plus CH Originals which are delivered several times a week from their in-house writing and production team. Additionally, why not check out some of their articles, contests, and interactive features plus videos and pictures submitted by their fans. CollegeHumor is a sister site to Vimeo, another one of our supported sites.

We hope you enjoy these excellent new supported sites and please suggest other sites we should support by dropping us a line at reception@worldtv.com.

You wait ages for a bus, then 3 come along at once. Today we’re releasing a trio of new features that we think you’ll like… very much.

Embeddable Player Customization

We know that our users like embeds – a lot. More than 5,000 WorldTV channels are embedded on other websites and those pesky players get a workout of 5 million views a month. We’ve had to add 2 new servers to cope with all the pressure, and employ a small army of people with wet handkerchiefs to cool them down. Well maybe not the last part.

One of our most requested new features is to add greater customization options to the embedded players. Well starting today, live right now, no need to wait, you will see a new button within the Editor Widget section called ‘Advanced’. This new button reveals the following new features…

• Customize the background colour of your player widget
• Customize the foreground colour (the player controls)
• Display a frame from the 1st video in your playlist

There’s a couple of caveats. You will need to click ‘Preview’ in the Editor to preview the player properly and it currently takes quite a long time for the video frame to display at high quality (possibly several hours). This will be improved shortly but we wanted to get this out to you asap.

Improved Drag & Drop

Have you ever been frustrated with the moving of clips within the playlist? We have been and it’s been on our ‘bugging us’ list for way longer than we’d care to admit. It’s hard to describe and only regular users will notice the difference but you should find moving clips around within the Playlist much easier from now on.

YouTube Problem Solver

Since we added support for the official YouTube player there are times when videos you would like to add to your channel are not allowed. A common reason is that the video on YouTube has been disabled for embedding or for copyright violations. Since many of you had videos from before the official YouTube player arrived and to help troubleshoot problems that can occur in future, we have added something that we call the YouTube Problem Solver.

Basically this does what it says on the tin and lets you diagnose any issues you may have with YouTube videos that aren’t playing in your channel. You will get a small notification (an orange exclamation mark) that lets you view information about the video, visit the original page on YouTube to see the reason why it’s no longer available, and even search again for similar videos. It’s a great way to clean up your YouTube video collection.

Other bug fixes and improvements

• We now offer ‘channels’ support for Daily Motion – add multiple clips using a Daily Motion channel URL
• Fixed an issue with the next/previous buttons on embeddable players
• Fixed an issue where sometimes the video would start on an embedded player before the animation had finished loading (classic skin)
• Fixed an issue where sometimes the 2nd video clip in a playlist would not play on embedded players if it was a YouTube clip
• Fixed the search functionality for Google Videos. Google Videos now add correctly.

WorldTV users love YouTube and indeed a high proportion of the videos on WorldTV hail from the world’s largest video site. WorldTV was one of the very first sites to build around the YouTube platform, and we recently completed a major re-engineering of WorldTV to use the latest YouTube technologies.

What this means is greater reliability moving forward for watching and playlisting YouTube videos and new features that take advantage of some of the great initiatives coming down the pipe from YouTube.

The first of these new features is natural seeking within YouTube videos as you watch them on WorldTV. You may have noticed with many video websites that you have difficulty fast forwarding or moving to a different point in the video. Sometimes you move the slider and it bounces back, sometimes you let it go and it jumps somewhere else. This can be very frustrating and is an unfortunate side-effect of how videos generally work on the Internet.

Well the good news is that starting today on WorldTV you can move the slider around to any point in a YouTube video, even parts of the video that haven’t yet downloaded. It only applies to YouTube videos for now, but hopefully other video sites will support this functionality in future.

We plan to bring you some other cool YouTube features like HD compatibility soon.

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Have you ever wished that you could add videos to your WorldTV channel more easily?

The new feature lets you add web videos to either your library or playlist, or both, as you browse supported video sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe etc. You don’t have to be logged in to your WorldTV Editor to do this, you don’t have to copy & paste URL’s. A single click on a ‘bookmarklet’ in your web browser adds the video instantly.

Setting it up takes seconds… Under the Promote tab in your Editor you choose the type of bookmarklet that you want (Add to Library, Playlist, Both) and then you simply drag and drop the generated link to the toolbar of your web browser.

With the bookmarklet installed all you need to do is browse to a video page like the Bruno / Conan O’Brien clip above and click the bookmarklet to add the video instantly to your WorldTV channel. A confirmation message appears to tell you the video has been successfully added.

There’s all kinds of great uses for this new feature. Here are some ideas…

• If you make use of our Twitter functionality (to send tweets automatically) you can use the bookmarklet to rapidly share video finds over Twitter – without ever having to log in to your WorldTV channel
• Create a separate WorldTV channel that is solely for your personal viewing pleasure and you can save and bookmark videos for later personal viewing. This is the original idea of Fred Wilson’s ‘Watch Later Project‘ – the idea that you can bookmark videos during the day as you find them (eg at work), and sit back and watch them in the evening.
• Using WorldTV’s RSS capability the videos that you bookmark become an RSS feed. There are many uses for this including the ability to watch the videos in a media browser like Boxee.
• A cool idea is to use Xmarks to synchronize your bookmarks across all the different computers and web browsers that you use. The WorldTV bookmarklet will then appear on your home computer, work computer, laptop etc, allowing you to save and bookmark videos into WorldTV wherever you find them. (Note you don’t need to use Xmarks to do this – you could simply add the bookmarklet to each computer separately… but Xmarks makes this easy to do and is generally very cool)

For the more technically inclined, each bookmarklet is tied to the WorldTV channel you generated the bookmarklet for. So you can create different bookmarklets for different channels if you like (if you run multiple channels). We’d recommend editing the name for each bookmarklet if you do this, within your web browser, so you can differentiate between them.

Our short-term plans for this new feature are to improve the look and feel of the confirmation message that appears after you’ve clicked the bookmarklet, and make the message auto-disappear after a couple of seconds (you currently have to click a close box).

We hope you enjoy the new bookmarklet feature on WorldTV and find many creative ways of using it!

Nova ferramenta Bookmarklet – acrescenta vídeos com um clique

Você já quis acrescentar vídeos ao seu canal de WorldTV de maneira mais fácil?

Graças a um recente comentário no blog de Fred Wilson, ficamos influenciados a apresentar uma ferramenta que estamos planejando há algum tempo.

A nova ferramenta permite que você acrescente vídeos da web tanto para sua videoteca quanto para a sua lista, ou para ambos, quando você seleciona sites de vídeo como YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, etc. Você não precisa estar conectado ao seu Editor do WorldTV para fazer isso, você não precisa copiar e colar URLs. Um simples clique em um “bookmarklet” no seu navegador acrescenta o vídeo imediatamente.

Sua instalação dura segundos … Na aba Promover do seu Editor, você escolhe o tipo de bookmarklet que quer (Acrescentar à videoteca, Lista, Ambos) e depois você simplesmente arrasta o link criado para a barra de ferramentas do seu navegador da web.

Com o bookmarklet instalado, tudo o que você precisa fazer é procurar uma página de vídeo como a de Bruno / Conan O’Brien, clipe acima, e clicar no bookmarklet para acrescentar imediatamente o vídeo ao seu canal de WorldTV. Uma mensagem de confirmação aparece para mostrar que o vídeo foi acrescentado com sucesso.

Há todo tipo de usos importantes para essa nova ferramenta. Aqui estão algumas idéias…

• Se você faz uso da nossa função Twitter (para enviar tweets automaticamente) você pode usar o bookmarklet para compartilhar rapidamente os vídeos encontrados no Twitter – sem precisar conectar-se ao seu canal de WorldTV .

• Criar um canal separado de WorldTV que seja apenas para o seu prazer pessoal de assisti-lo e você pode salvar e marcar vídeos para assistir depois. Essa é a idéia original do “Projeto Assista depois” de Fred Wilson – a idéia de que você pode marcar vídeos durante o dia, quando você os encontrar (por exemplo, no trabalho), sentar e assisti-los à noite.

• Usando a habilidade de RSS do WorldTV os vídeos que você marca se tornam um RSS feed. Existem muitos usos para isso, incluindo a agilidade de assistir aos vídeos em navegador de meios de comunicação como Boxee.

• Uma ótima idéia é usar Xmarks para sincronizar seus bookmarks através de todos os computadores diferentes e navegadores da web que você use. O bookmarklet da WorldTV vai então aparecer no seu computador de casa, no computador do trabalho, laptop, etc, permitindo que você salve e marque vídeos no WorldTV, onde quer que você os encontre. (Observe que você não precisa usar marcas X para fazer isso – você pode simplesmente acrescentar o bookmarklet em cada computador separadamente … mas as marcas X tornam isso mais fácil para fazer e é geralmente muito bom).

Para os mais aficionados tecnicamente, cada bookmarklet está ligado ao canal de WorldTV para onde você criou esse bookmarklet. Assim você pode criar diferentes bookmarklets para diferentes canais se você quiser (se você acumula vários canais). Se você fizer isso, recomendamos que edite um nome para cada bookmarklet dentro do seu navegador, para que você possa diferenciá-los.

Nossos planos a curto-prazo para essa nova ferramenta são desenvolver a aparência e testar a mensagem de confirmação que aparece depois que você clicou o bookmarklet, e fazer a mensagem desaparecer sozinha depois de alguns segundos (atualmente você precisa clicar na caixa para fechar)

Esperamos que você aproveite a nova ferramenta bookmarklet no WorldTV e encontre muitas maneiras criativas para usá-la!

We are very pleased to announce two excellent new additions to our supported sites. These two sites are quite diverse in nature. The first is the international news agency Reuters which has managed to preserve its independence, integrity, and freedom from bias in its news reporting at a time when almost anything goes in broadcast news. Reuters’ reputation remains intact and they offer truly global news coverage with a team of several thousand journalists who over the years have covered all the major news events, while often seriously endangering their own lives. Reuters has a strict policy towards upholding objectiveness and they have refrained from using the word “terrorist” in their reporting unless it is as part of a quote. Reuters will be an excellent resource to channel creators who wish to have the best in objective news clips no matter what the direction of their channel. Check out this excellent channel which focuses on climate change and is made exclusively from Reuters’ news reports.
The second new supported site is the sometimes controversial yet always hilarious website that is Ebaumsworld. Home to numerous crazy pranks, hilarious wipeouts, classic commercials, wicked stunts, zany stand up routines and more, you cannot fail to find something entertaining at this popular website. You can also check out their flash cartoons, jokes and chatrooms amongst the entertainment media available at this web recreation portal.

We hope you enjoy these brilliant new supported sites and do continue to suggest other sites we should support by dropping us a line at reception@worldtv.com.

We are delighted to announce two awesome new additions to our supported sites. They certainly are different in nature but both websites will offer genuine audio-visual riches for many of our channel creators and viewers. The first one is The Onion News Network – a ridiculously funny site (not intended for those under 18), where the masters of fake news push today’s politically correct boundaries in a zany, madcap way usually leaving the viewer in fits of hysterical laughter. Here at WorldTV, we are long time fans of The Onion’s crazy, satirical brand of humor and we are very excited to now be supporting their brilliant video content. You really must check out some of the hilarious clips we found on The Onion News Network, right here on our Best of The Onion News Network channel.

The second of our two new supported sites is the wonderfully diverse LiveLeak with its mandate of “Redefining The Media”. LiveLeak lets users post and share videos but unlike most video sharing sites out there, it really is super-keen to promote discussion and debate of controversial political, current affairs and real life footage of international events like wars and natural disasters. The site gives users a place to post, comment on and debate anything from citizen journalism, to celebrity gossip, to education reports, to news from the front lines of international war zones, to entertainment updates. To commemorate the addition of this awesome, original video site why not watch a collection of some of Liveleak’s most entertaining clips, according to us, here on our brand spanking new Best of LiveLeak channel.

We hope you love these excellent new supported sites and please feel free to drop us a line at reception@worldtv.com suggesting other video sites we should be supporting.