Metacafe Issues
Unfortunately you may have been experiencing some problems adding (or viewing clips) from the very wonderful Metacafe – one of WorldTVs favorite video content sites.
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
Read MoreWhat is ‘Fair Use’ in online video mashups?
The issue of copyright infringement is something that most people are aware of. It’s pretty obvious that if you take a recent movie or TV show and rebroadcast it or distribute it online in its entirety, that is copyright infringement. But are you aware that a legal principle of ‘fair use’ exists, and has done so for more than 150 years? And that ‘fair use’ means that much of the current trend for mashups and parodies of copyrighted content is, in fact, totally allowed?
The US based ‘Center for Social Media‘ is an organization with a good track record of educating everyday people about the law, and establishing guidelines that people within the legal world actually follow. They’ve just released a ‘Code of Best Practices for Online Video‘ which we think will be of interest to many WorldTV producers.
In the spirit of fair use itself, we’ve reproduced the main points below. Do read the whole document if you intend to make use of these provisions.
What is Fair Use of copyright material?
Here are the main principles of ‘fair use’.
- Commenting on or critiquing of copyrighted material
- Using copyrighted material for illustration or example
- Capturing copyrighted material incidentally or accidentally
- Reproducing, reposting or quoting in order to memorialize, preserve, or rescue an experience, an event, or a cultural phenomenon
- Copying, reposting, and recirculating a work or part of a work for purposes of launching a discussion
- Quoting in order to recombine elements to make a new work that depends for its meaning on (often unlikely) relationships between the elements
A PDF of the guidelines can be found here, an online version is here.
Read MoreGeorge Carlin R.I.M.F.P.
The legendary comedian George Carlin who continuously pushed the boundaries of what is socially acceptable has died of heart failure aged 71 and what better way to pay homage to the great man than to watch, listen and laugh to a true pioneer of comedy.
George Carlin Rest in Peace and we hope that the doorman at the Pearly Gates turns a blind eye to your wondrous profanity.
The late great George Carlin is celebrated in video here on WorldTV
Read MoreArticle in the Irish Independent Newspaper covers WorldTV
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.
Read MoreLive video support for the iPhone coming
Our friends over at Qik have been hard at work lately on expanding the range of phones which can be used to do live video streaming. This means WorldTV users will soon have a much wider selection of phones to add live video to their channels.
First up, we can tell you that iPhone support is coming. You can read more over at Mashable and see a demo of it in action by Michael from Qik.
Secondly, Qik will soon have support for Windows mobile based phones. Coverage of this over at Techcrunch.
If live mobile phone video streaming is of interest to you, be sure to follow the Qik blog. We’ll also post updates here as the support for both goes live.
Read MoreTu.TV for you/para ti
Tu.TV for you!
Spanish-speaking countries are some of WorldTVs biggest growth areas to date and so in recognition of this we have added Spanish language site Tu.TV. Tu TV is an extremely popular video content site among Spanish speaking communities globally and we hope this special addition to our “list of supported sites” enables our users to discover even more Spanish language clips.
Create your own WorldTV Channel here
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¡Tu.TV para ti!
El mundo hispanohablante es una de las más importantes áreas de crecimiento de WorldTV hoy en día y debido a esto hemos incorporado el sitio Tu.TV de idioma español a nuestra página Web. Tu.TV es un sitio extremadamente popular entre los hispanohablantes en todo el mundo y esperamos que esta adición especial a nuestra “lista de sitios sostenidos” permita a nuestros usuarios descubrir más video clips en idioma español.
Crea tu propio Canal de televisión aquí
Read MoreThe Marrakech Update – Improved player, alerts box & 40 more improvements
Hard to believe this update has taken three weeks to get out the door, but it’s amazing how the little things all add up, and boy there’s a lot of little things (and two big things) in this particular site update.
Improved Player
We’ve improved the appearance of the WorldTV player and this affects all channels in the WorldTV system. It’s slicker, it’s more compact, it has a new blue progress bar which we think looks smarter – custom colours and other user configurable options are coming.
Alerts Box
Another visible addition is the introduction of a new WorldTV Alerts box (powered by Twitter) within the Editor. Packed with tips, news, messages and interesting links – it means we can communicate much better many of the cool things going on here at WorldTV and other stuff we come across, without having to bombard people with e-mail.
We’ve tried to make it subtle, unobtrusive and we’ll keep the messages genuinely interesting and useful. It can be permanently turned off in Settings if you wish, but we think you’ll want to keep it. (In English only for now).
Other Improvements
There are more than 40 other bug fixes, cosmetic fixes, and other improvements in this update.
Cosmetics
- Improved design for main WorldTV player – more compact, better colours and playhead
- Rotating WorldTV logo on homepage, create pages and Editor
- Removed strange green line on Editor, panels now bigger, can fit more on screen
- Snazzy gradients added to tabs and sub panels – woe be Web 2.0
- X close icon improved to be more obvious
- Improved and stylish font for clip title text on player
- List of supported sites link more prominent, added TuTV as supported site
- MySpace and Metacafe logos added to search panel
- Preview Player within Editor updated to match Main Player
- Supported site logos in Create Wizard updated – new ones, cosmetic adjustments
- Qik logo cosmetic irregularity in Playlist fixed
- Editor playlist box made taller – see more of the Playlist
- Save/View My Channel button made bigger
- Search results panel next/previous buttons made bigger
- Site wide supported sites logo design tweaks
- Navigation tab text improved, white hover, etc
- Dynamic resizing of Main Player transport controls panel allowing it to be less wide
User Improvements
- New supported site Tu.TV (v.popular Spanish video site)
- New WorldTV Alert’s box in Editor for system messages, news and tips
- Added World page link to navigation bar in Editor
- Webcam record video playhead & functionality improvements, cosmetic improvement too
- End of clip position of player tracker now goes to beginning on all players and webcam feature
- Mins and secs now displayed on player when scrubbing playhead (forward/rewind etc)
- Editor now alerts you if a video doesn’t add properly
Bugs
- View Channel/Save Error button issue. Problems were occurring when a user changed the language
- Unknown Source clips in Library and Playlist (still unknown sources but better than before)
- Unable to Add clip to Library in certain random situations
- Missing Thumbnails in Library and Playlist on search panels (improved)
- Send Clip/Channel to friend issue – charset issues and line feed (improved)
- Flag drop down in Player and Editor issue – had to click twice
- Page load up window error – pre-loader would sometimes appear in the top left corner of the page in some browser/os configurations
- Change library clips preview panel button ‘Add to Library’ to ‘Add to Playlist’
Backstage
- QIK auto-add to playlist Improvements
- Add clip from Search – logic improved
- Numerous improvements to our Administration control panel and backend
We now switch our focus to looking at some of the features suggested on our Feedback page, some important ‘under the hood’ improvements which will improve stability, and some other planned updates.
Enjoy!
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