Last updated: Apr 28th 2008

Introduction

WorldTV is designed to be insanely easy to use, so easy… “our mums could use it”.

We wanted to make the world of online video accessible to everyone, including those just starting out on the Internet, and this page is designed to assist people who need a helping hand, while also catering to those who want more technical depth.

We start with a beginner’s guide to the service. If you’re more technically inclined or in a rush, you can skip right to the more technical stuff, but the beginner’s guide is a good read if you have time.

A Beginner’s Guide to WorldTV

At it’s simplest, WorldTV is a place where you can collect all your favourite videos safely in one place.

Once you’ve collected them at WorldTV, you can easily share them with friends, family… or the whole world, on your own online TV channel. You don’t need to share them with other people if you don’t want to, but it’s more fun if you do.

The first step is to create a channel on WorldTV. A WorldTV channel is just like the channels you see on TV, only it appears at a web address (which you choose), and you get to choose the videos which appear on it. Each time your friends come to visit your channel, they will see the videos you have chosen to appear. It’s as simple as that.

It’s worth taking a little time over creating your channel initially, because it’s here where you choose the name for your channel and a logo to go with it. Although both of these can be changed easily later on, it’s a good idea to start how you mean to go on. For example, the name of your channel influences the web address that you give out to friends. If you start giving an address out, it’s harder to change it later.

We can explain this with two examples:-

Example 1

If you choose ‘DebraTV’ as your channel name, your web address becomes…

www.worldtv.com/DebraTV

In this case, you can also give out your address as…

www.worldtv.com/debratv

or even…

worldtv.com/debratv

All of these addresses will work.

Example 2

You choose ‘my favourite web videos’ as your channel name, your web address becomes…

www.worldtv.com/my_favourite_web_videos

Due to the way the Internet works, we must swap any spaces for the underline (_) character.

Our personal preference is example 1, in other words with no spaces, but it’s entirely up to you what you choose.

The rest of our channel creation process is straightforward, you get to choose a logo for your channel (this is like the MTV logo in the corner of the screen), and you give us your e-mail address. We use this e-mail to send an important welcome e-mail containing details for how to access the service in future, and it’s very important you don’t delete this e-mail, or rather the information it contains.

The welcome e-mail we send after you create your channel contains two important web addresses (links). These two links are all you need to operate your WorldTV channel, so you should save a copy of this e-mail carefully. The two web links are as follows…

One is a public link for you to give to friends (this is like worldtv.com/debratv above).

The other is a private link for you to access the service, organize your videos, change your logo.

As a convenience, after you have gone through the step-by-step process, we take you directly to your private link. A useful tip is to bookmark this page when you arrive there in your web browser. Our step-by-step guide will remind you of this just beforehand.

When you arrive at your private link (for example www.worldtv.com/debratv/editor), you will see a screen looking something like this…

We call this the ‘WorldTV Editor’, and it is from here that you can control your channel and all your videos.

When you go to your public link, it will look something like this…

This is your channel as other people see it.

It’s the Editor however where all the action happens, and it’s organized into different ‘tabs’ or sections that do different things. We think tabs are an easy way to organize a page so that it doesn’t become too cluttered.

By using Tabs, you do not ever need to use the Back button on your browser which you may be used to using. In fact, using the Back button will take you away from the Editor, which most of the time is not what you want.

One of the first things we suggest people do is go into the section labelled ‘Channel Settings’ and create a password. We call it a secret word. This is optional, but if you want to be sure that only you can change the videos on your channel (or people you give the password to) it’s a good idea. This is because it is not hard for someone to figure out what the private web address for your channel is. In fact, the private web address for your channel is the same as the public address, only with the addition of ‘/editor’ on the end. For example… www.worldtv.com/debratv becomes www.worldtv.com/debratv/editor to access the Editor.

Creating a password is very easy, you click the ‘Channel Settings’ tab (at the top of your Editor), and look for the section where you enter your password, which looks something like this…

Simply click the checkbox which says ‘Use password to access the Editor’, and enter the password (secret word) in the space below.

Tip - Note the other option which is ‘Do not require password for this computer’. This is a handy feature that lets you avoid having to enter a password from a computer that only you have access to. We make a note of your computer, and do not ask for a password when you use it. Using any other computer will prompt for the password to be entered.

Now for the fun stuff…!

Let’s take another look at your Editor…

You can see there are 3 main sections to the page…

At the top left is the Search Video/Add Clip by URL panel. This is where you search and add video to your channel. In fact, anything to do with getting video into your channel is located here. More on this in a moment.

Bottom left is the My Video Library section. This is your own personal library of video clips! When you add video to your channel the video is stored here.

On the right side is your Playlist. Any videos that you move from your Library to your Playlist become available at your public address for people to view.

So the basic process for running a channel on WorldTV is 3 steps…

1. Search for videos (using the panel at top left)
2. Add them to your Library (bottom left)
3. Move them from your Library to your Playlist

When a friend comes to visit your channel, they will see all the videos that you have in your Playlist, starting with the video at the top and working down the list. A new feature lets you randomize your playlist so that viewers see a random video each time they visit - this is particularly useful for music channels, your channel becomes like a jukebox. Note that in no case can viewers see the videos that are in your personal Library.

That’s pretty much the basics of WorldTV.

A few useful things to know…

• You can double-click any video in your Library or Playlist to watch it by itself. The video will appear in a pop-up window which you close using the [x] icon at the top right of the panel. All pop-up windows in WorldTV close in the same way.
• Moving clips from your Libary to your Playlist is achieved by dragging the clip with your mouse. Click once on the clip in the Library, continue holding the mouse button down, and drag the clip across to the Playlist. Let go of the mouse button when it is hovering over the position you want it to appear in the Playlist.
• You can re-arrange the order of clips in your Playlist (or Library) by dragging them around in the same manner described above.
• You can delete clips by dragging them to the Trash/Rubbish bin icon which looks like this…. Let go of the mouse button when the clip is hovering over the bin.
• Moving clips from the Library to the Playlist does not delete them from your Library, it makes a copy of them. In other words, you can freely move clips to your Playlist or delete them from your Playlist, safe in the knowledge that a copy is always kept in your Library.
• You can change the title of a video by double-clicking on the title and giving it a new name. This name appears when someone watches the beginning of a video clip on your channel, so it’s good to think about what this says.
• You can jump to the public view of your channel (to see what it looks like to other people), by clicking the ‘View My Channel’ button (bottom right). A couple of notes about this button… the first time you click it, you might get a security alert message regarding pop-up windows. This is a feature for your protection. If you experience this, try to follow the instructions on the alert message to allow pop-up windows on WorldTV, or get a friend to help you with it. You should only have to solve this issue once. You will know it is solved if when you click the button, your channel appears in a new window. To get back to your Editor in this case, you click the window or tab containing your Editor. It will be there somewhere!

One other note that sometimes confuses people…

Sometimes… when you click ‘View My Channel’, it says ‘Save My Channel’ instead.

If this happens, click ‘Save My Channel’, wait a couple of seconds and the button will change back to ‘View My Channel’. You can then click it a second time to view the channel. This is a feature relating to auto-saving your channel, and is there to help you.

In terms of getting video into your channel, we suggest people use the search feature to begin with. When you are comfortable using search, you can read more about the ‘Add Clip by URL‘ feature and the ‘Record Video by Webcam‘ feature. These open up the range of video sources you can use for your channel.

That’s it for the introduction! Play around, see what you can do, then come back here when you want to learn more!

Enjoy!!

Full WorldTV Features Manual

Editing Video

Search Video

We currently support YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! and AOL Video. More supported sites are on the way.

Add Clip by URL

You can add clips by pasting in URL’s from a range of popular video sites. These include…

MySpaceTV, Blip.TV, Metacafe, YouTube and Break.com, with many more in the pipeline.

Due to a limitation with Adobe Flash, you cannot use the standard Edit->Paste method to paste in a URL. Instead you should right-click on the field itself or use the keyboard shortcut for your particular operating system (e.g. CTRL-V on PC).

Cool feature - You can paste in a URL to any FLV file hosted on any web server. This includes high definition FLV files. If this is your own web server, be forewarned that you may incur high bandwidth use if your channel gets very popular. If you want to avoid this problem, we recommend using any of the above mentioned video hosting sites. Blip.tv in particular allows hosting of very high quality FLV files.

Record Video by Webcam

This very cool feature lets you record video clips directly into your channel Editor using your webcam. This feature is brand new and experimental, and we are working to make it better all the time. Try different combinations of video and audio source until you get it to work.

Multi-Select

You can select multiple clips in the Playlist and Library using standard keyboard shortcuts - e.g. Shift-Click and CTRL-Click. This allows you to delete or move around many clips at once.

Code-View

Tech-types may be interested to know that you can view the underlying TV RSS code that powers WorldTV, simply by selecting the CodeView checkbox on the Channel Settings tab. TV RSS is a a soon-to-be open standard created by WorldTV for describing the contents of a TV channel, and is akin to MIDI for video. An RSS feed for your channel is available at worldtv.com/your_channel_name/rss. This feature is still in development so the format of the feed may change (for the better).

Logo tricks

You can upload your own MTV style logo using the Channel Settings tab. GIF, JPG and PNG image formats are supported and we recommend PNG format if you want to use any kind of transparency effect. The Upload button is not yet perfect so when you click it, please wait a few seconds if you think nothing is happening.

You can also specify a web address that the logo will link to such as a personal blog or website.

Similarly you can specify pop-up (tooltip) text for the logo. This is text that appears when someone hovers their mouse over your logo. Cool.

Download Video

If you want to create a backup copy of your video content you can right-click on any video thumbnail to download the video file to your computer. You must agree to a legal notice before doing so. You should rename your files ’some_file_name.flv’ to use them. For playback of FLV files, you can use the cross-platform VLC player. Here’s an article on how to convert FLV files into other formats. This feature is also still not quite perfect.

Editable Titles

You can edit the title of any clip simply by double clicking it. Clip titles will appear on your channel at the beginning of each video, unless you have disabled this feature in Channel Settings.

Statistics

Our new Statistics feature is very cool and lets you see useful information about visitors to your channel. You can see where they come from in the World, how long they watch for and the percentage of repeat to new viewers among other things.

Watching Video

Full screen mode

When watching a WorldTV channel you can view it full-screen by clicking the full-screen button. This is well worth checking out if you haven’t already tried it. Sit back and enjoy…

Keyboard Control while watching videos

When you are watching videos, you can pause and resume playback using the SPACE bar.

You can also use the CURSOR keys to move to the next clip.

Due to a limitation with Adobe Flash, keyboard control does not work during full screen mode. We are waiting patiently for Adobe to fix this.

The WorldTV World Page

Our very first directory of channels within the WorldTV system categorizes each channel into where it comes from, specifically the country where the channel was created. You can click on a flash map to see the channels from a particular country, and use the ‘breadcrumb’ navigation to see channels from a particular continent, or indeed, the entire World.

Not every channel created within WorldTV appears on this page. Channels created in WorldTV are ‘private’ by default, meaning they will not show up on this page unless the user chooses for them to do so in their Channel Settings page. Some early channels in the system were made public by an automated process.

Channels are organized by popularity, which is based on an algorithm we use to determine popularity. So that people are not tempted to ‘game’ the system, we do not make the details of this algorithm public. Suffice to say that we use a fair system with no editorial ‘override’.

Roadmap of future features

Here are some of the features we’re working on or planning along with estimated launch dates…

• Channel Statistics (like Google Analytics) - End of January
• More video sources, better reliability of existing ones - Ongoing
• Publicity features - February
• Embeddable small flash viewer for blogs, MySpace etc - February
• Organization for your personal library, folders etc - Feb/March
• A paid subscription service allowing uploads - Feb/March
• Interactive playlist for channel viewers - TBA
• Trim video - TBA
• Greater customization of channel appearance - TBA
• Social features - TBA

Why not join us now (if you’ve not done so already) and come along for the ride!

If you have an idea for a feature you’d like to see, please drop us a line at reception@worldtv.com