WorldTV

Ok so this is a bit of a geeky post so feel free to skip if this isn’t your bag…

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.

WorldTV is a truly global experience demonstrated here by a selection of blog links from Colombia, Holland, Portugal, Spain, France, Denmark, Italy…

bleebot.com	radiovisie.eu	enter.com	jespercarlsensblog
vertele.com	youon.it	cabecavazia	yannerwan8

As always we are extremely grateful to the websites and e-journalists that have supported us with their reviews, coverage and feedback thus far. We thank you from the bottom of our Internet hearts!

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)

To the left of your browser you should see a new small ‘Feedback’ tab hanging off the side of the page.

Since we value your feedback and suggestions a great deal, we’ve added this new feature so you can participate more fully and easily in the conversation regarding future features for WorldTV.

Similar to Digg, you can vote on features and suggestions to show which ones you feel most passionately about. It’s easy to use just like everything on WorldTV, and there’ll be speedy responses from our team indicating when suggested features might be introduced. You can also use the Feedback feature to send private suggestions directly to our development team.

Please note the feedback tab is not intended for customer support issues! For these, please continue to use reception@worldtv.com.

Why not suggest a new feature for WorldTV now?

WorldTV wishes you all a bunny hopping, chocolate egg munching, family hugging Happy Easter!

And should you (for some strange reason) find yourselves with a large surplus of unwanted easter eggs then fear not as our friends at Stupid Business Ideas have come up with just the thing..

Click here for The Easter Egg Eating Service

This week WorldTV welcomes “Italian” to its list of supported languages.

You can choose your preferred language using the flag option at the top of the page.

Grazie!

WorldTV is now home to over 13,000 channels!

These channels are extremely diverse in content ranging from just plain old fun to the more discerning professional use and (from what we’ve seen so far) everything in between!

We aim to ensure you have as much source content choice as possible through our various supported sites (see image) but would love to hear from you with recommendations for new content sites that we don’t yet support!

For example, a Teacher recently contacted us and requested site “Teacher Tube” be added to our supported sites, thus enabling them to use WorldTV for educational purposes. So we added it!

You can contact us at reception@worldtv.com with your suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

If you have your own website, why not embed your WorldTV Channel in a page on your site? It’s easy to do.

A couple of WorldTV users have already done this - Hi Fashion TV and Zonatrek.

If you do this for your channel, drop us a line… we’ll help promote it!

A lesser known feature lets you turn your logo into a link. This link can be to any website.

Some people use this to link their channel back to their website. Others are linking one channel to another channel!

While the latter is something we hadn’t thought of, we encourage experimentation at WorldTV, and a logo link is a simple way you can drive traffic to other places.

The way to do it is simple. Go into Channel Settings and look for the Logo section. Here you can enter a web address for your link. You can also specify the text that appears when someone hovers their mouse over your logo. This is called ToolTip text.

(I wonder what someone from the 18th Century reading these instructions would make of them?)