WorldTV

Our recent news announcement about the new EPG feature was cross-posted to Techcrunch.com on Friday and earned a separate review on Techcrunch France.

We have many loyal users in France and some 2,000 French channels. A translation of the Techcrunch FR article is below and we’re grateful to Alain Eskenazi for his ongoing coverage.

“WorldTV is on a roll. We last wrote about WorldTV a few months ago, the service that allows you to aggregate videos from different platforms like Google Video, YouTube, Metacafe, MySpace and AOL, and create your own TV channel. The long-term goal of WorldTV is to cross the divide in future to web browsers on WiFi enabled TV sets and games consoles.

With this in mind, WorldTV this week launched an EPG feature that lets you view the programs of other channels without having to navigate elsewhere (more on EPG’s here), making the user experience close to that encountered on cable, for example.

WorldTV also launched an advertising platform in early December; allowing producers to monetize their channels inserting their Google Adsense code. All details (in French) on this new platform here.

The concept of WorldTV goes a little against the current trend of traditional video sharing platforms, yet WorldTV is having some success; Alx Klive, the CEO of WorldTV reveals that more than 100,000 channels have already been established on the platform by 70,000 users from 190 countries including over 2,000 in France. The site claims 600,000 monthly visitors. The company has recently reduced the number of employees and spending by 50% to achieve break even.”

Italia SW is a popular Italian technology site and revisited WorldTV for a review following the launch of our recent EPG feature. A translation of the article is below…

“Remember WorldTV? WorldTV is an aggregator of video clips found on YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, MySpace and AOL. Compared to the hundreds of other Video Aggregators found on the Internet WorldTV has proven to be an innovative product, because anyone can create their own custom channel inserting links to favorite videos, all hosted on a video sharing portal.

YouTube is embracing HD video (YouTube has been testing HD video for months) and WorldTV is innovating as well by launching new features.

When we last reviewed WorldTV on Italy SW, WorldTV was a small startup, but now it has over 100,000 channels and also 600,000 users each month. Comparing the numbers of WorldTV to those of these other startups, people might snigger, but this is a victory because this site does not host any videos. Videos are streamed from the main video sharing and embedding sites.

What’s new at WorldTV? The first thing to tell you about is the new player – where a new sidebar is located on the left for the scrolling of videos. The sidebar provides a user experience similar to that of browsing the channels on a Web TV station, but it is individual video clips presented in a specific order or random. Also new on WorldTV is a sidebar on the right – a random list of stations determined using geo-location. This means that we have a high probability of finding stations created by users of our own nationality.

WorldTV is a Web Application to try because we are not just limited to video input, but we can also record broadcasts from our webcam. The most advanced technology is that you can also broadcast programs from your phone, in which case you will need an account on qik.com.”

In its first update to the list in two years, the UK’s Guardian newspaper has picked WorldTV.com as a Top 100 site for 2009. Right alongside the BBC’s iPlayer, YouTube, Joost and Vimeo.

We’re proud and just a little humbled to be in such prestigious company and are very grateful to the Editors at the Guardian for their inclusion.

While we’re at it… writers we enjoy reading at the Guardian include Vic Keegan, Jemima Kiss, Aida Edemariam and Jack Schofield.

Mike Butcher of Techcrunch UK has written an excellent article on WorldTV’s new EPG feature.

In it he says…

“In some sense WorldTV is going up against other user-generated video sites like YouTube, Magnify.net and Kyte.tv. But the difference is that this has been built from the ground-up to actually work on a TV… The experience is much closer to a TV one and that’s important.”

Mike is a sterling advocate of the UK and Irish based startup scene and doing a steller job. See him in full Santa garb as master of ceremonies at the recent Techcrunch Talk / Xmas party just a few nights ago.

We’re pleased to announce that an embeddable player for WorldTV (above) is now in final testing and will shortly be available to all channel owners. Today it got its first workout in a post on Techcrunch.com.

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to implement a genuinely useful and flexible embeddable video player, and the kind of features people want most. This is just the first small step in our plans to offer a range of widgets that give content publishers genuinely useful options, wrapped up in classic WorldTV ease-of-use fashion.

The embeddable player you see has had no specific customization for Techcrunch other than we are hosting the video content on WorldTV. The logo you see is the channel logo for the channel, and appears automatically as a way of branding the player to the content owner. We believe strongly in keeping WorldTV branding to a minimum and will offer options for eliminating it entirely.

Getting this player out the door has been three days of all night coding to meet the Techcrunch deadline. Surviving the inevitable onslaught of traffic from being on the homepage of Techcrunch has also been… interesting!

Watch this space, and don’t forget to sign up for our blog-by-email service if you want to be sure not to miss our exciting news announcements to come.

Ireland’s national newspaper the Irish Independent today ran a feature on the coming ‘TV Revolution’ which includes a nice write-up of WorldTV.

In it our Founder (pictured) talks about the channels everyone is making on WorldTV saying “People are starting to put their own shows together, ranging from music compilations to genre-specific channels such as extreme mountain biking”.

He goes on to say “We’ve worked very hard to make the interface easy to use. There’s no learning curve. My mum’s made a channel and if she can, anyone can!”

The full text of the article can be read on SiliconRepublic and the Irish Independent website.

Vic Keegan writes in the Guardian newspaper today a detailed article about WorldTV and calls it a “a laboratory for tomorrow’s film and television producers”.

WorldTV’s press release regarding live video support and its integration with Qik.com appeared on Yahoo! Finance and Forbes.

In the release distributed by Business Wire, Founder Alx Klive says “We strive to give programming control to the user, and Qik allows us to go one step further and turn the programmer into the live broadcaster, all from their mobile phone”.

A printable version of the release can be found here (PDF).

Mashable says that the addition of live video functionality into WorldTV is a smart move and serves to level the playing field for WorldTV.

The world’s number 1 technology website says WorldTV has a “simple, consumer friendly feel to it“. Techcrunch UK has extended coverage.