WorldTV

WorldTV’s press release regarding live video support and its integration with Qik.com appeared on Yahoo! Finance and Forbes.

In the release distributed by Business Wire, Founder Alx Klive says “We strive to give programming control to the user, and Qik allows us to go one step further and turn the programmer into the live broadcaster, all from their mobile phone”.

A printable version of the release can be found here (PDF).

Mashable says that the addition of live video functionality into WorldTV is a smart move and serves to level the playing field for WorldTV.

The world’s number 1 technology website says WorldTV has a “simple, consumer friendly feel to it“. Techcrunch UK has extended coverage.

WorldTV’s partnership with Qik.com has been covered in the Washington Post.

Big news in WorldTV land. Starting today, you can now broadcast LIVE to your WorldTV channel from your mobile phone.

We’ve partnered with the hottest name in mobile phone broadcasting, Qik, to allow for a whole range of new functionality that is really very cool.

Basically how it works is that you can now use your mobile phone as a live video camera for WorldTV, which can ‘take over’ your WorldTV channel whenever you feel like it. If someone is watching your channel when you start recording video using your phone, the ‘regularly scheduled programming’ (your playlist) is paused, and the live signal from your phone begins. As soon as you stop using your phone, the regular programming resumes from the point you left off. Simple!

All the live recordings that you make with your phone are automatically archived as clips in your Library. This means you can capture video of events that you’re at, safe in the knowledge that you’ll have a copy of them stored in your WorldTV Library. You can then download them to your hard drive by right-clicking on the file in your Library. You can do this for any file in your Library actually.

A range of useful options let you customize the functionality as you wish. For example, you can choose not to have your phone recordings go live on your WorldTV channel as you’re making them, but be archived straight to your Library instead.

You can choose sound effects and text that play when a live broadcast begins. At the moment, around 40 phones are supported, all from Nokia. More are on the way. If you’re in the market for a new phone we recommend the Nokia N95 or the Nokia E51 (with camera). Both phones work great with WorldTV and Qik.

There’s a number of ways you can use this new functionality.

• As a simple means to record things while you’re out and about, knowing they will be safely archived in your WorldTV library without you having to do anything else. No messy cables or confusing software to deal with.
• Live broadcasts from concerts or events for your friends. Simply tell your friends to go to your WorldTV channel and when you start broadcasting live, the channel will automatically switch to the live stream. If you use Twitter, Qik can notify your Twitter followers whenever you are broadcasting live.
• Become a Lifecaster. Basically you can now broadcast any interesting (or not so interesting!) happenings in your life to friends, family and indeed the World. Walking down the street, going for a drive, on the beach, at a party.
• Add live content to your WorldTV channel from other Qik broadcasters. If you find someone who regularly broadcasts on the Qik.com site, you can add them as a ’source’ without having to own a supported phone yourself. Simply add their Qik username as a source.

Qik will guide you through the process of setting up your phone for live streaming. The instructions are not terribly complicated, but you should set aside 30 mins or so to get it right. This is cutting edge stuff.

The basic process is this…

1. You sign up for an account on Qik.com (Use this link and you’ll be approved for a Qik account right away)
2. They send you an SMS with a link to install the Qik live broadcasting software on your phone
3. Play around with the software and phone, make sure your videos are appearing in your Qik account (on Qik.com). If you get a ‘certificate error’ issue upon installation, see this solution.
4. Create a custom Qik username for your Qik profile. In other words… change your Qik username to something more memorable. This part is important. Use the ‘Edit my profile’ link when logged into Qik and select ‘Change your username’.
5. Add your new Qik username to your existing WorldTV channel in the Editor (on the ‘Phone’ tab)
6. Configure any options you want using our handy wizard, or simply use the defaults
7. Start broadcasting live from your mobile phone to WorldTV

Like everything on WorldTV at the moment, this service is in ‘beta’, meaning there may still be quirks while we iron out the wrinkles. We really value your feedback, so please make use of the new feedback tab on the left of these pages to tell us what you think, or how it could be improved. If you have any difficulties getting it set up, feel free to comment directly on this post below and we can then respond publicly so everyone can benefit from the advice.

Qik are a cool company that launched the same time as WorldTV. We’ll be working with them to bring you many more cool features in future.

N.B. If you’re an existing Qik user coming to WorldTV for the first time, you can import all your existing Qik videos into WorldTV simply by pasting in your Qik URL (eg qik.com/smashing) into the ‘Add Clip by URL’ tab on WorldTV. You’ll need to create a channel on WorldTV first which takes no time at all. Simply use our very easy-to-use channel creation wizard.

WorldTV has appeared on Mashable the super Social Networking News blog that keeps you up to date with all things techy.

Recently they very kindly included WorldTV.com in their scribblings.

The WorldTV team uses Mashable on a daily basis and heartily recommends their RSS feed.

So thanks to all at Mashable for ‘getting’ us and making some excellent suggestions.

Read Mashable article here

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)