WorldTV

Toby’s Choice is a new weekly WorldTV blog post featuring a selection of cherry picked channels reviewed by yours truly (above) hence the title (A prize goes to the first person who can now guess my name?).  My aim is to travel through our World of 50K+ channels (latest count) discovering the cream of the crop that won’t necessarily feature in the World Page Top 40 “picks”.  I’ll be looking for channels that display quality and originality in various guises, of all shapes and sizes and I’ll hopefully sniff out some undiscovered gems for your viewing pleasure.

So without further ado lets get the review show on the road and see what we can find lurking beneath the surface.

Week 1

1.    Jazzmode worldtv.com/jazzmodetv

For those of you who enjoy the world of Jazz in its various forms this music adoring channel has some real jewels that had my feet tapping, head jacking and goose bumps dancing to that thing called Jazz..  I particularly love the George Benson video. A quote from the creator. “JazZMode Tv is an integration of Vision and Audio of 20th century’s most profound art form, the Splendid art of Jazz. JMTV delivers Jazz to its viewing audience like never before; taking you on a journey though the history of the art, with interview clips on some the greatest Jazz icons from the past, the present and some phenomenal new talents that are paving the way and leading us into the future of Jazz music.” OBJ Ziniwuchi Ihekoromadu. JazZMode Media Network

2.    The Muppet Show worldtv.com/themuppetshow

The Muppet Show was created by the late great Jim Henson and when i was a kid it was staple Saturday night TV and as a family, we all used to cuddle up on the sofa and watch it together. From 1976–1981 TMS ruled the roost of mainstream TV with its great scripting, music, ageless humor and unbelievably high profile guests who were quite happy to play the fool in front of a huge TV audience.  Looking back with fond memories TMS now seems even more genius and funnier than ever.  Kermit and gang were perhaps victims to special effects sweeping through the 80’s leaving little room for talking puppets but “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” and this is TV gold!

3. You Tubes “Fred” worldtv.com/fred

An example of “like it or loath it” Web TV is “Fred”.  Lucas Cruikshank is Fred, a 14 year old kid (pretending to be 6 yr old with anger management issues) who has now reached 45 million+ views, unbelievable stats given the low budget nature of its content.  I’ve watched a few of the Fred mini-sodes now and while i can completely understand those that find it painfully mind numbing and deeply irritating i happen to think its very well executed, edited and produced and i freely admit i found it rather amusing.  Commercially it has proved its ability to reach the masses with the amazing power of its viral appeal. See what you think? After some delving we discovered that Fred is being sponsored by the ZipIt: http://fredonzipit.com

So thats Toby’s Choice in a WorldTV nutshell, we do hope you enjoyed it, please feel free to send me YOUR recommendations they are ALWAYS welcome!

You can contact me at tobyschoice@worldtv.com

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

¡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

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 ‚Äì 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 ‚Äì charset issues and line feed (improved)
• Flag drop down in Player and Editor issue - had to click twice
• Page load up window error ‚Äì 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!

WorldTV now boasts over 23,000 user channels from the seriously sublime to the ridiculously funny!

We continuously scour our network of channels looking for quality content in all genres and languages. A very popular theme among channel creators seems to be the questioning of modern thought, accepted truths and the uncovering of conspiracy theories

Previously we featured channel Join the Revolution which went right to the top of the World Page charts, this weeks hot tip is Project Matrix! Hailing from sunny Spain and currently riding high at number 4 in the World chart, Project Matrix have created several superb channels probing various globally important topics from the past, present and future. They have also cleverly embedded their channels on their fantastic Project Matrix blog. To quote:

Project Matrix show series and episodes of non-commercial broadcasting, interlinked by various themed reports, covering any news or information that may be “hidden, ignored or suppressed” and is considered of interest to all humanity.”

Project Matrix also took considerable time and effort to give WorldTV some excellent detailed feedback which enables us to develop and improve our service further. This is incredibly beneficial for the success of WorldTV and we encourage all user feedback be it positive or negative..

So thanks Project Matrix from all the team at WorldTV

To view Project Matrix WorldTV channels click:

proyectomatriztv

tratadodelisboatv

venezuelalibretv

channel_11-s_tv

exopolitica tv