Minor change to WorldTV Interface
We’ve moved the navigation bar on WorldTV channels up a little bit to comply with YouTube Terms of Service, and to ensure that ads are not covered up by the navigation bar. We’ve also moved the position of the Channel Logo to the top-left position when YouTube videos are playing. All other aspects of the service are unaffected.
Read MoreWorldTV goes HD! New Embeddable player
We’re excited to announce that WorldTV is now available in glorious High-Definition!
While the WorldTV platform has always been ‘resolution agnostic’, in practical terms it has not always been straightforward to add Hi-Def videos to WorldTV channels. That has all now changed.
Today we are announcing full support for YouTube HD videos… and it works a treat!
With the new features you can now rapidly build a TV channel out of YouTube HD video clips and broadcast it on WorldTV.com, or, through our new embeddable player (pictured).
Here’s how it works…
- Within the WorldTV Channel Editor there is a new setting called ‘YouTube Video Quality’. You’ll find it under Channel Settings -> Player.
- As the Channel Owner, you set the quality for how you would like YouTube videos to be played – we suggest HD720 if your viewers are on fast connections
- When viewers watch your channel, we attempt to play the video quality you have selected. If that quality is not available from YouTube, we try the next lower quality version until we find one that is available. This process if totally seamless, fast and automatic. If you choose all HD video clips for your channel, this process won’t be necessary.
- Viewers also have the option to change the video quality if they wish – up or down.
- With this update we’ve already upgraded our default YouTube Quality setting on WorldTV to high resolution (YouTube 480). So you should see an immediate improvement in quality even if you don’t change anything at all.
There is no need to re-add YouTube HD videos to your channel or change the way you add YouTube videos in future. Every single YouTube video in your collection has already been upgraded to HD where possible, and we will automatically upgrade all your future YouTube videos as well. Simply continue pasting in URL’s to YouTube videos as before, and they will be shown in HD where possible. Not all YouTube videos are available in HD of course.
With over 85% of WorldTV channels featuring YouTube videos, this is a feature that will drastically improve the experience for nearly all WorldTV channel owners and their viewers.
New HD Embeddable Player
At the same time we are releasing a much improved WorldTV embeddable player that makes full use of the new HD features. It looks amazing (see above) and is highly configurable. The main features are…
- Much improved graphic design
- Fully customizable with intelligent colour theming system
- Customize the buttons – Share, Like, HD on/off, Embed
- Fully HD compatible – YouTube HD looks amazing!
- It’s available now within your Editor
Here are the full technical details for those interested…
High-Definition Capability
- The new HD features work throughout WorldTV including within the Editor (eg when previewing videos), on WorldTV channels, and in our embeddable players. We have upgraded all our embeddable players to be HD compatible, adding ‘HD ON’ and ‘HD OFF’ buttons to all players.
- HD ON means 720p resolution and HD OFF means 480 resolution
- Viewers can change resolution on-the-fly, and the video continues playing from the same point (the video does not restart). This is very cool.
- The default setting on WorldTV channels (i.e. not the embeddable players) for YouTube Video Quality is now ‘high’. This is equivalent to YouTube’s ’480′ resolution. Previously it was ‘medium’ (YouTube 360). The other options are ‘low’ (YouTube 240), ‘medium’ (YouTube 360), 720HD and 1080HD.
- It’s important to appreciate that the speed of your viewer’s internet connection is only one factor that determines whether they can reliably watch HD video. A fast, modern computer is also required, and we have found that current netbooks and MacBook’s for example are only just able to handle HD720 video. You may want to consider the kind of viewers you have and their likely types of computers, when determining whether to change your channel to HD. For this reason we do not recommend changing your channel to HD1080 at this time, except for specialist uses and applications.
- The button that allows viewers to change the video quality only appears when a YouTube video is playing, and then only on YouTube videos that have multiple resolutions available. YouTube typically offers anywhere from 1 to 4 resolutions for a video. Older YouTube videos are typically only available in 240 ‘low’ resolution although many are available in 360 ‘medium’ resolution. This doesn’t matter from your perspective as the system will default to a lower resolution if needed.
- The viewer’s HD setting is remembered from one video to the next, and from one viewing session to the next (assuming cookies are retained)
New Embeddable Player
- The new ‘Slick’ player is now the default embeddable player on WorldTV
- Existing embeddable players (eg that you have already installed on your website) have not been changed
- Do check out the ‘Advanced Options’ when creating an embeddable player
- Note that changes to the options for each style of player in your channel affect all installed embeddable players of that type. So if you change the colour scheme for the new Slick player for example, this will change across all embeddable Slick players that you’ve installed. It won’t change the colour scheme for any ‘Classic’ or ‘Modern’ players that you may have installed elsewhere.
- The ‘like’ button currently records any clicks into our own database. Statistics on clicks will be retained and made available to channel owners in future along with other useful ‘suggested videos to watch’ features. We recommend keeping it turned on if you’d like this data available to you in future.
We hope you enjoy the new HD features of WorldTV and our brand new embeddable player. Please ask any questions via comments below and be sure to drop us a line at reception@worldtv.com if you come up with any interesting implementations. We plan to feature a few of your implementations in a future blog post.
Enjoy!
Read MoreNew Viewer Share Panel released – Facebook, Twitter, Email & More!
Starting today, viewers of WorldTV channels will see a new share button and panel that lets viewers readily share clips on Facebook, Twitter and E-Mail. The old system for ‘Send Clip to Friend’ and ‘Send Channel to Friend’ is no more.
The idea is to make it much easier for viewers to share WorldTV content and to give channel owners a new tool that will help with natural promotion of their content.
The old system for ‘Send Clip to Friend’ and ‘Send Channel to Friend’ has been in place since the very earliest days of WorldTV. It was a simple system for sharing content by email. Unfortunately it did not work very well if a user had a Gmail or Hotmail account for example, and required email programs like Outlook. The new Share Panel offers a much improved system.
The big additions are of course the options to share by Facebook and Twitter. We have worked hard to bring you these features, and implemented several other related features:
- URL’s for individual video clips on WorldTV now have ‘pretty’ URL’s. So instead of worldtv.com/alxtv?vid=21, we now use worldtv.com/alxtv/video/shatner-of-the-mount-by-fall-on-your-sword. This is better for Search Engine Optimization, which should be a boon to channel owners, and is more intuitive. The old style urls will continue to work for backwards compatibility.
- Links shared by Twitter will automatically be shortened through Bit.ly. A big benefit of this is that savvy users can view live statistics on who is watching their shared content. Simply add a plus symbol (+) onto the end of any bit.ly link to view the live stats
- When an individual video clip is shared, a new ‘landing page’ is created for that clip. Here’s an example. This is a big step towards our goal of offering customizable channel homepages. The design of the page is far from finished and will improve dramatically as we implement the winning designs from our ‘design a user homepage for WorldTV’ competition
- Content shared on Facebook will now have the correct image, title and description
- Content shared on Facebook can be viewed ‘in-line’
Another benefit of the improvements is that the player controls are now more streamlined and we think look much better than before.
Do let us know if you experience any issues.
Read MoreNew Suggested Videos Tab
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.
Read MoreTop 25 YouTube Clips within the Editor
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.
Read MoreNew Improved World Page – Top YouTube Clips, Search, Lightbox
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.
Read More