We have already made a series of improvements, and in this post we delve deeper into the behind-the-scenes world of WorldTV’s technical architecture, and how we intend to improve things even further.

WorldTV currently runs on 7 high-specification dedicated servers, and was first designed five years ago, well before the current trend for ‘cloud’ servers.

Cloud servers are essentially ‘computing on demand’, and for website owners it has the advantage of distributing high demand for a website over hundreds of different computers (that are shared between hundreds of different websites). In this way websites that are getting popular can have their demand met, while other websites that are not as popular use less resources. It’s a simple idea that generally works well.

We think that some form of cloud hosting is in our future and we have begun to carefully plan and research a migration towards that. It’s a significant overhaul to change the architecture of a site like WorldTV (some may remember the growing pains that Twitter experienced), and we are moving carefully in that direction. In the meantime there are several things we are doing to improve things in the ‘here and now’, and this work has already begun.

Yesterday we turned off some of our non-essential statistic reporting services (behind the scenes stuff) which should speed up loading of the Editor, and in particular Web Mode. If you have tried in recent days to access the Web Mode feature and been put off, we invite you to try again.

Tonight at 1am EST we will upgrade our primary ‘embed’ server, aka WorldTV Server 5. This server has suffered the most in recent days, as you can see on our regularly updated uptime graphs.

The problem that some users experienced today logging in to their Editors, or viewing the TV mode versions of their channels, we believe was a one-off issue, but we shall be monitoring this closely in the days ahead. In fact we strongly encourage all WorldTV users to follow us on Facebook, and post comments there if anything is not working. While we do run extensive monitoring software, some problems slip through the cracks, and we are not always immediately aware of them. In general our Facebook page is becoming our primary forum for two-way feedback with our community of users.

We will have more to share in the weeks ahead as we work to improve the speed and reliability of our service. We believe in being transparent about everything we do, and we hope you enjoy the new features and improvements as much as we enjoy bringing them to you.

UPDATE MARCH 2012

We have made further improvements this month and have upgraded WorldTV Server 1 to a higher specification. Uptime in the past 7 days has been 99.76%. We’ve also been running experiments with cloud hosting on some parts of the site. The results of this have been encouraging and we are pushing forward with plans to implement this particular improvement permanently. Watch this space!

Somos contentes de informar que as questões acerca da utilizacao dos videos do Metacafe e  do Dailymotion foram resolvidas.

We are equally pleased to announce three new additions to our supported sites.  Vimeo is showing hockey stick growth and popularity and has been an early adopters “video must”.  Brazil is now a huge region of WorldTV users so we have dutifully added Dada and Leechvideo to our list of supported sites to hopefully offer a wider variety of content for our Brazilian/Portuguese channel creators and viewers.

Somos igualmente contentes de anunciar três novas adições aos nossos sítios suportados. O Vimeo está mostrando um crescimento de popularidade muito forte e foi um dos primeiros sites a utilisar “vídeo must”. O Brasil é agora uma região com uma forte concentracão de usuários da WorldTV portanto acrescentamos respeitosamente os sítios Dada e Leechvideo à nossa lista de sítios suportatos para oferecer confiantemente uma mais larga variedade de conteúdo aos nossos criadores de canais e espectadores Brasileiros/Portugueses.

Vimeo

LeechVideo

Dada.net

So why not visit your WorldTV Channel Editor and Add some URLs from these fabulous supported sites!

Então, por que não visitar o seu Editor de Canal WorldTV e acrescentar algums URLs desses fabulosos sítios!

Looking for more video content on the web?  Then WorldTV highly recommends OVGuide a super search site for all kinds of Online Video.

Voces estao procurando mais conteúdo no internete?  Então o WorldTV cordialmente recomenda a OVGuide um otimo sítio de busca de todas as espécies de Vídeos Online.

We are doing our very best to resolve this issue ASAP and will keep you posted with any new developments.  Meanwhile please be advised that adding Metacafe URL’s to your channel may not be possible and videos added may also be temporarily unavailable to view.

Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

WorldTV Technical

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.

Tonight we moved all our DNS hosting over to a company called UltraDNS who handle hosting for MySpace, Amazon, Oracle, Digg and other major websites. Basically it means that accessing the website should be just a little bit zippier for our friends in far flung places, and make it generally more reliable. It’s also more secure, meaning our site is less vulnerable to so called DNS attacks.

UltraDNS operate servers all over the world, and although electricity travels at the speed of light, the milliseconds it takes to travel from one side of the world to the other (and back) can add up. By having servers located closer to our friends and users, we can reduce that.

Our new partnership with UltraDNS is all part of our never ending desire to increase the reliability and performance of our service. We’re proud to be in such prestigious company as the excellent sites above.

By default the WorldTV system has a limit of displaying 100 clips in the Library and the Playlist (total 200 clips).

If you want to upgrade your Editor to 500 clips in the Library and Playlist (total 1000) you can now do so for a one-time fee of $10.

If you add more than 100 clips to either the Playlist or the Library (or both), older clips may disappear from view. The older ones are still ‘in the system’ however, and if you delete newer clips, the older ones will reappear.

We’ve also added an Editor’s Pick icon for channels that we think are cool.

Watching channels from around the World can be addictive!

Have a wonderful holidays and don’t forget to show your relatives how easy it is to create their own channel on WorldTV!