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

Our record-by-webcam feature has been the one aspect of the site that we’ve been the least happy with for some time. We’re happy to announce that today it has been upgraded significantly.

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.

Vic Keegan writes in the Guardian newspaper today a detailed article about WorldTV and calls it a “a laboratory for tomorrow’s film and television producers”.

When you first create a channel in WorldTV you do not need to enter a password to access the channel editor. You simply visit your Editor URL which we send you by e-mail.

This works fine for many people but is really not very secure.¬† We strongly recommend people add a password so that other people can’t mess with your channel.

It’s easy to do, simply visit Channel Settings and look for the option which says “Use password to access the Editor”. You’ll find it on the Channel tab.

Adding a password (aka ’secret word’) is especially important for channels that are set to public.

WorldTV has a crack squad of coders working hard behind the scenes to bring you all the clever features that make up WorldTV.

Myself (Alx) and Toby are today heading off today to the Ukraine for a couple of weeks to work alongside our development crew.

If you’re interested in following our trip, I’ll be blogging about it on my personal blog complete with live mobile phone videos like this one (archived videos here), and Toby will be twittering.

Have you made a cool channel? Want the World to see it?

When you create a channel in WorldTV it is not public by default. This means it will not appear on the WorldTV World page. If you’ve been wondering why your channel does not appear on this page, this is almost certainly the reason.

Simply go into your Editor page and look under Channel Settings. On the Channel tab you should see a checkbox which says ‘List Channel Publicly’. Tick this box and you’re done.