WorldTV

WorldTV is pleased as punch to announce that our Embeddable Player is now ready!

Following on from our experiments creating an embeddable player for Techcrunch, our tireless programmers have been putting the finishes touches and tweaks to the first WorldTV ‘Widget’ which is available now as a new Tab in your Editor.

With this new Embeddable Player you can promote your WorldTV channel by adding it to web pages and blogs. You simply select a desired size and copy and paste the embed code into the HTML of your desired webpage.

At present the Player has one dynamic skin (design) which automatically brands the Player with your current channel logo (so a good excuse to give your logo some love and attention) and throws in a nice airy, cloud animation to be a little different from the rest. We will be introducing more skin choices including a basic traditional player in the very near future - with improved options to customize.

How does the embeddable player work in practice?

The WorldTV Widget is a miniature version of your channel and will play all the videos in your playlist back-to-back or randomly, according to how you have your channel set up. Another way of looking at it is that it’s a widget for sequencing a playlist of videos, and these can be videos from our supported sites (YouTube, Metacafe etc) or FLV files hosted on any web server, or webcam videos you’ve recorded using our Webcam record feature. If you have your channel set up with our partner Qik, you can stream live video from your mobile phone to your widget as well. So it has all the key functionality of our main player.

Unlike many other embeddable players ours is configured to track viewing statistics. This means that viewers watching your embeddable player will show up in the Statistics displayed in your Editor.

As we’ve said, this is a first pass at creating an embeddable player for WorldTV and we have lots planned in the way of different designs, functionality etc. We’re already working on these things, but wanted to get this out to you ASAP.

So, don’t be shy!  Give it try?

N.B. The embed code does not currently work on MySpace due to the way MySpace restricts use of the <iframe> tag. We’re working on a fix for this.

Tu.TV for you!

Spanish-speaking countries are some of WorldTVs biggest growth areas to date and so in recognition of this we have added Spanish language site Tu.TV. Tu TV is an extremely popular video content site among Spanish speaking communities globally and we hope this special addition to our “list of supported sites” enables our users to discover even more Spanish language clips.

Create your own WorldTV Channel here

¡Tu.TV para ti!

El mundo hispanohablante es una de las más importantes áreas de crecimiento de WorldTV hoy en día y debido a esto hemos incorporado el sitio Tu.TV de idioma español a nuestra página Web. Tu.TV es un sitio extremadamente popular entre los hispanohablantes en todo el mundo y esperamos que esta adición especial a nuestra “lista de sitios sostenidos” permita a nuestros usuarios descubrir más video clips en idioma español.

Crea tu propio Canal de televisión aquí

Hard to believe this update has taken three weeks to get out the door, but it’s amazing how the little things all add up, and boy there’s a lot of little things (and two big things) in this particular site update.

Improved Player

We’ve improved the appearance of the WorldTV player and this affects all channels in the WorldTV system. It’s slicker, it’s more compact, it has a new blue progress bar which we think looks smarter - custom colours and other user configurable options are coming.

Alerts Box

Another visible addition is the introduction of a new WorldTV Alerts box (powered by Twitter) within the Editor. Packed with tips, news, messages and interesting links - it means we can communicate much better many of the cool things going on here at WorldTV and other stuff we come across, without having to bombard people with e-mail.

We’ve tried to make it subtle, unobtrusive and we’ll keep the messages genuinely interesting and useful. It can be permanently turned off in Settings if you wish, but we think you’ll want to keep it. (In English only for now).

Other Improvements

There are more than 40 other bug fixes, cosmetic fixes, and other improvements in this update.

Cosmetics

• Improved design for main WorldTV player - more compact, better colours and playhead
• Rotating WorldTV logo on homepage, create pages and Editor
• Removed strange green line on Editor, panels now bigger, can fit more on screen
• Snazzy gradients added to tabs and sub panels - woe be Web 2.0
• [X] close icon improved to be more obvious
• Improved and stylish font for clip title text on player
• List of supported sites link more prominent, added TuTV as supported site
• MySpace and Metacafe logos added to search panel
• Preview Player within Editor updated to match Main Player
• Supported site logos in Create Wizard updated ‚Äì new ones, cosmetic adjustments
• Qik logo cosmetic irregularity in Playlist fixed
• Editor playlist box made taller - see more of the Playlist
• Save/View My Channel button made bigger
• Search results panel next/previous buttons made bigger
• Site wide supported sites logo design tweaks
• Navigation tab text improved, white hover, etc
• Dynamic resizing of Main Player transport controls panel allowing it to be less wide

User Improvements

• New supported site Tu.TV (v.popular Spanish video site)
• New WorldTV Alert’s box in Editor for system messages, news and tips
• Added World page link to navigation bar in Editor
• Webcam record video playhead & functionality improvements, cosmetic improvement too
• End of clip position of player tracker now goes to beginning on all players and webcam feature
• Mins and secs now displayed on player when scrubbing playhead (forward/rewind etc)
• Editor now alerts you if a video doesn’t add properly

Bugs

• View Channel/Save Error button issue. Problems were occurring when a user changed the language
• Unknown Source clips in Library and Playlist (still unknown sources but better than before)
• Unable to Add clip to Library in certain random situations
• Missing Thumbnails in Library and Playlist on search panels (improved)
• Send Clip/Channel to friend issue ‚Äì charset issues and line feed (improved)
• Flag drop down in Player and Editor issue - had to click twice
• Page load up window error ‚Äì pre-loader would sometimes appear in the top left corner of the page in some browser/os configurations
• Change library clips preview panel button ‘Add to Library’ to ‘Add to Playlist’

Backstage

• QIK auto-add to playlist Improvements
• Add clip from Search - logic improved
• Numerous improvements to our Administration control panel and backend

We now switch our focus to looking at some of the features suggested on our Feedback page, some important ‘under the hood’ improvements which will improve stability, and some other planned updates.

Enjoy!

Our record-by-webcam feature has been the one aspect of the site that we’ve been the least happy with for some time. We’re happy to announce that today it has been upgraded significantly.

There’s still a few things we want to do to improve it further but we wanted to bring you the main improvements right away. Notably the issues that many people were having with audio should now be fixed, we’ve simplified the interface to make it easier to use, and we’ve added visual feedback for volume so you know the audio is working.

Please give the webcam feature a try and let us know any issues or thoughts you have in the comments section below. Some more technical details follow…

Technical - We have removed the resolution options as they were confusing for many people. We have set the resolution and quality to fixed values which should work well for most people in most situations. We plan to improve on this by adding a feature that will auto-test your upload bandwidth upon initialization of the webcam and set the quality and resolution accordingly. This will mean that everyone gets the best possible quality for their connection speed. Naturally people’s internet connections vary a great deal in terms of speed, particularly when it comes to upload speed. This is the relevant aspect for recording video into our site. There is a known issue which remains relating to very short clips. In this situation you may experience the WorldTV buffering logo appearing, although this doesn’t affect the recorded clip.

Page search improved

We’ve improved our search feature (on the right of this page) so that all pages of the site are searched. Previously only posts like this one were being searched and not ’static’ pages such as our FAQ or Manual. With this improvement, it is now well worth doing a search if you come across a problem or want more info on something.

RSS Feature now in testing

We’ve been quietly testing an often requested feature which is RSS feeds for WorldTV channels. First suggested to us by tech blogger Robert Scoble, we’ve been tweaking the formatting of it the past couple of weeks, and while those tweaks are still ongoing, you can start experimenting with it right away (if RSS is your bag) by simply adding /rss onto the end of any WorldTV channel URL. (Eg. http://worldtv.com/comedy/rss).

Not everyone ‘gets’ RSS but basically in our case it means that viewers can be notified automatically when your WorldTV channel is updated. Anyone who uses an RSS reader such as Google Reader can now get updates when you add new content to your channel. If you’ve not tried Google Reader, it’s worth a try.

Twitter community now on WorldTV

We’ve added a WorldTV Community section to the right of these pages for all our Twitter followers. It displays the thoughts and musings of some 200 WorldTV users who are active on Twitter. If you don’t know what Twitter is and don’t get it, fear not, we didn’t either at first. What changed everything for us was trying the excellent and free Twitterrific for Mac, which makes Twittering as easy as instant messaging. If you’re on a PC, an equivalent and highly rated program is Twhirl. You don’t need either of these programs to use Twitter, but they do make the experience a lot more compelling. Sign up to join our Twitter community here.

Video not found error

There was a major bug relating to search results. If you tried to add a video to your library from the ‘Preview Video’ window (i.e. you were watching the video and clicked ‘add clip to library’) the video link would fail with an error message saying “Video not found. Check your internet connection or video source and try again later”. This bug has now been fixed. Unfortunately this bug was not immediately obvious as it was still possible to add videos from the search results panel. Thank you to 8 year old Sean H in Liverpool for bringing this to our attention.

Unknown Video Title bug

We’ve fixed a problem where you would sometimes get ‘Unknown video title’ as the name for a video added via search. This bug was related to the one above, and only occurred if you added a video from the playback panel as above.

If you come across a bug on WorldTV, do please let us know via the Feedback tab on the left side of these pages. Your fellow WorldTV users will thank you! (as will we)

Starting today, you can now read all our regular site pages like this one (News, FAQ, Manual, etc) in 10 languages. The WorldTV application itself was translated back in December, but now news alerts like this one are instantly available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese!

The translation uses the Systran engine, which is an automated system, and although by no means perfect, it does provide reasonably good understanding. Better than this at least…

We’ve been beavering away tirelessly here at WorldTV HQ this past week:

• In Channel Settings / Player tab we’ve added a marvelous new “video aspect ratio” option. You can now select “Fill Screen” allowing you to watch your channel with expanded view in the Player. Why not try it now and watch your videos in their full screen glory!
• A few design features to help site navigation, you’ll notice new home tabs on the “Create” and “World” Pages and a click on logos now take you to the home page!
• Had problems with logo sizing? Then worry no more as we’ve automated the size when you upload a logo to your channel. Give it a go in Channel Settings and create your very own channel logo!
• Some site e-fumigation is gradually killing off a few nasty little bugs, the latest being titles mismatching with videos, we apologize for any user experience inconvenience caused to date.
• The World Page has had a little nip and tuck for your visual pleasure, we hope you like it.

Please feel free to contact us with your valued feedback suggestions, we are open ears at WorldTV.

A number of improvements today…

You will now see random background images in your Editor. This feature was available before but now it is enabled by default. You can still choose a specific background in the Channel Settings though - ‘Grass’ is rather nice

We’ve introduced a clip counter in the Editor so now you know how many clips you have in your library. This helps out with managing the 100 clip limit announced a couple of days back, which will be implemented later this weekend.

We’ve also improved the navigation of the site - a click on the WorldTV logo will now take you to the homepage. We will be rolling this ‘click the logo’ feature across the site and there may still be a few more places we need to change.

We’ve added a ‘Why not create your own channel at WorldTV?’ promo message to the Player which will help convert casual viewers into community users of the site. Don’t worry, you can remove it if you wish (see below for more). The message should benefit everyone though, as it will mean more viewers checking out other channels. If you want to help us build the WorldTV community, please consider leaving it enabled for a while.

If you prefer to remove it, you can disable it in your Channel Settings. It will always be our philosophy to give channel owners this kind of ‘opt-out’ control, as we think it’s important to do this.

The ring binder on the Editor is gone! Some of us are sad to see it go, but hey, most people weren’t crazy about it. We’re working to spruce up the design in general, and some newly added transparency to the Editor is also a new feature today. It means the background image shows through a bit more.

That’s your lot for now… more improvements coming soon!

It’s big, it’s bad, it’s beautiful, and it’s called our new Statistics Tab. And it’s live now in your Editor!

If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, you’ll be instantly at home here… the new Statistics Tab is a series of graphs, pie charts and data that show exactly how many people are viewing your channel, where they are coming from in the World and what percentage are new users compared to old.

For the past month we’ve been quietly gathering the needed statistics so that starting immediately today you can see viewing figures going back the last 30 days. We think it’s an exciting new insight into how people are engaging with your channel…. and it’s pretty cool too!

Elsewhere you will see further enhancements on the site. We’ve improved the layout of the Settings tab and added a powerful new feature called ‘Random Playlist’. This simple feature means viewers can see random videos from your playlist each time they visit - very useful for music channels and the like.

Hope you like the improvements and as always you can give your feedback in the comments section below, or by e-mail to reception@worldtv.com.