WorldTV broadcasts surprise U2 gig LIVE
Well this past Friday was an eventful day at WorldTV… thanks to a tip from a friend, the power of Twitter and then a sequence of serendipitous events, WorldTV pushed the envelope using our experimental live channel and broadcast the only LIVE video stream of U2′s surprise gig from a rooftop in central London.
After getting the heads-up from an industry friend, it began with our founder experimenting and creating a live audio broadcast of the band interview preceding the show. It soon became a live global video broadcast as our founder tracked down a video feed of the event from the BBC and made the necessary technical adjustments on the fly. Within minutes more than 500 people were watching the event from the four corners of the earth.
As one WorldTV user said, “… I’d like to thank you for broadcasting live the U2 gig last night in UK. I’m in the Philippines and, obviously, I can’t watch BBC. It was my birthday yesterday and your move was one of the greatest birthday gifts I’ve ever had in my entire life…”
If you missed the gig you can catch it here and watch this space for many more exciting and interesting experiments to come.
If you’re a food or drink lover you won’t want to miss our first ‘official’ live broadcast taking place this Friday.
Read MoreManaging multiple channels just got easier
If you operate multiple channels on WorldTV it can be a headache to switch between the Editor for each channel. Starting today you can now switch between each channel you own from a drop-down menu within the Editor itself. The drop down menu is located at the top right hand corner (see image).
If you can’t see the drop-down menu or the drop-down menu is not displaying all of your channels, please check the notes below…
- You will only see the drop-down menu if you have multiple channels.
- We match channels using your e-mail address, so make sure that all your channels have the same e-mail address in ‘Channel Settings’.
- All your channels must have passwords (secret words) to appear in the drop-down menu. The passwords don’t need to be the same.
For security reasons you will be asked to enter a password the first time you switch to a channel using the drop down menu. This is one-time only for each channel. After that you will be able to switch effortlessly.
Read MoreWorldTV links with Facebook to power Oscar’s coverage for ZoomTV
This has to be one of the coolest implementations yet of WorldTV – an embeddable player and Facebook widget developed in conjunction with ZoomTV and Facebook to power coverage of tonight’s Oscars.
Our partner Sameer from ZoomTV writes “I got an email from Randi Zuckerberg this morning, Facebook wanted to do for the Oscars what they did with CNN for the Obama inauguration. We had little time so out goes our regular WorldTV playlist, in comes an Oscar related channel, fused with the Facebook widget and the WorldTV embeddable player, and here we are!”
The WorldTV/ZoomTV/Facebook widget is now in pride of place on the ZoomTV homepage and during the Oscar’s will be updated regularly with clips and original content for ZoomTV’s 300 million monthly TV viewers in India. There is particular interest in the Oscar’s this year due to the popularity of Slumdog Millionaire, the Indian set movie that’s up for 10 Oscar’s in tonight’s gala ceremony.
WorldTV Founder, CEO & CTO Alx Klive says “It doesn’t get much bigger than the Oscar’s and a three way tie-up including ZoomTV and Facebook is very cool. What the team has done over at ZoomTV to put this implementation together, in just three days is nothing short of incredible. Tonight should be a fun night!”
The implementation shows how creative thinking and a little tinkering can be used to good effect with the WorldTV embeddable player. New features are planned to make this even more powerful for publishers in future.
You can track ZoomTV’s WorldTV and Facebook powered Oscar’s coverage over at zoomtv.in/oscar
Read MoreWorldTV adds cool Twitter Functionality
If you haven’t yet joined the Twitter party, now we’re giving all our users an even better reason to join in on all the fun!
Twitter is the most exciting new social networking service since Facebook. Twitter lets you broadcast brief text messages to your ‘followers’ which answer the question ‘What are you doing?’ People can reply or send private messages, and if you write engaging ‘Tweets’ you can quickly develop quite a following of people. Many celebrities are now on Twitter as a means to keep in touch with their fans.
Starting today you will find a brand new Twitter tab in your WorldTV Editor which lets you post messages about the videos you find to Twitter. We’ve put many hours of work into it, with an emphasis on our trademark simplicity, usefulness and ease-of-use.
Features include…
- Send a Tweet each time you add a video to your Playlist (including a direct ‘permalink’ to that video)
- Send a Tweet periodically (no more than once every 5 mins) when you are adding multiple videos to your playlist
- Send a manual message to Twitter (a regular style Twitter message). You don’t have to leave WorldTV to send messages to Twitter.
- View your Twitter stream right within your Editor. Scroll up or down simply by moving the mouse.
Using WorldTV in combination with Twitter is a great way to let viewers know when you’ve added new content to your channel. It’s an ideal way to promote and grow your audience because Twitter naturally lends itself to that. Just be sure to use Twitter to its full extent. A Twitter account that only broadcasts automated messages for example is unlikely to generate much of a following. A great document by a well known Internet marketing expert that introduces Twitter and explains how to use it (with an emphasis on marketing) is worth reading if you want to get serious with Twitter.
An added bonus of this great new feature is that you can now generate permalinks (links that do not expire) for any video clip in your WorldTV collection. We’ll write a separate post explaining this in more detail soon, but basically you could experiment now with permalinks by right-clicking on a clip within your Playlist. With a bit of ingenuity you can use this to generate embeddable players for an individual clip. Again we’ll explain more details on this feature in future.
Twitter is growing at an incredible pace. We strongly recommend to all our users to look into it as a means to meet incredible new people, find new audiences, and join one of the most fascinating communities and social developments on the web. Don’t forget to follow the WorldTV Twitter channel to be kept up on all our news.
Enjoy!
Read MoreWorldTV partners with Top Indian TV channel ZoomTV
WorldTV is proud to announce its partnership with ZoomTV, the pre-eminent Bollywood, Entertainment and Lifestyle channel in India, owned by the Times of India Group. Starting today, visitors to ZoomTV.in will get a flavour of what makes the channel so popular with an online version of the ZoomTV channel, powered by WorldTV.
“We’re excited to be working with WorldTV to launch this service for our web audience” said Sameer Pitawalla, Head, Digital. “The idea is to re-create the ZoomTV viewing experience online, and do it in a way that’s accessible to viewers everywhere. WorldTV lets us do just that and opens up our content to an estimated 3.6 billion Bollywood fans from around the World”.
Already the new service is showing signs of the global interest in Bollywood entertainment. Visitors have logged on from as far afield as Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Bhutan in the few hours the service has been live.
“We’re thrilled to be working alongside a channel of the stature of ZoomTV and the Times of India Group” said Alx Klive, CEO of WorldTV. “In terms of viewership, Bollywood is bigger than Hollywood, and ZoomTV is at the forefront of that. For us as well it’s our first CMS integration with a major media company and this can only be of benefit to all our users as we develop custom new features and functionality. Thanks to everyone at ZoomTV for their support and being such a pleasure to work with.”
If you’d like a taste of Indian flavoured entertainment and glamour TV from the best in the business, head on over to ZoomTV’s new online TV channel at the ZoomTV website.
Read MoreMusic is Good 4 U
As the world continues to slide into financial meltdown WorldTV is constantly working on providing our beloved Users with more FREE entertainment and today’s offering comes in the form of some musical medicine of yesteryear (in no particular order) to help ease the pain of those nasty red numbers…
Sinatra – WorldTV.com/Sinatra
Ol’ Blue Eyes was the leading crooner for many a moon which he flew us to on numerous occasions with his grainy silk wrapped voice and inimitable stage presence. Sinatra also forged a career as an actor of some repute, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here to Eternity and was also allegedly connected with some dubious Italian families..
Grace Jones – WorldTV.com/Grace_Jones
As we all know by now Grace Jones is no Shrinking Violet. For 3 decades she has sustained her iconic status with her incredibly extrovert style, attitude and groundbreaking music and has just recently released her first artist album in 20 years “Hurricane“. I’m a big fan and love her natural avoidance of the conventional and can even forgive her for the questionable acting performances in various 1980′s adverts and films (Conan the Barabrian being the best/worst). Check out some of the interviews in this channel for some vintage Grace Jones.
Bowie – WorldTV.com/Bowie
In the late 60′s & 70′s David Bowie’s musical output was consistently brilliant and his ability to continuously reinvent his stage persona as e.g. Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke (quite amazing really considering his drug fueled existence at that time). Early albums included Space Oddity (1969), The Man Who Sold the World (1970), Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), Young Americans (1975), Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977) to name but a few!! Is he the greatest living Englishman of our time?
John Lennon – WorldTV.com/John_Lennon
The Beatles were (and still are) a global phenomenon and the writing partnership of John Lennon & Paul McCartney is considered to be one of the all time greats. After The Beatles disbanded in 1970 Lennon went on to record his own material including arguably his most popular solo hit “Imagine”. He also became a political voice and peace activist for a generation exposed to a gloomy war ridden world (sound familiar?). Murdered in 1980 Lennon was voted eighth place in a 2002 BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Most people will always remember where they were when they heard of his murder…he is a legend indeed who will always be missed.
Also check out SmoothGrooversTV these guys really are awesome and their channel has been a favourite here at WorldTV for some time. Additionally, check out their homepage which offers all kinds of other jazz, soul and funk goodies.
In the not too distant future WorldTV plans to implement a new way to view channels by creating “Channel Categories” e.g. Music, Sport, Education etc. You will also be able to add a personalised description to your own channel and to add the caegory tag of your choice.
You can follow all WorldTV news and updates by signing up to our RSS feed here
Read MoreUpload your own background image to the WorldTV Editor
Sometimes it is the little things in life… that make things better.
Starting today you can now upload your own custom background image for the WorldTV Editor. Your viewers won’t see it but you will – each time you edit your videos.
It’s really easy to do. Go to Channel Settings -> Editor and you’ll see a new section for uploading a background image. Our system will resize the image to fill the entire background of the Editor automatically. To get the best result choose a large ‘wallpaper’ sized image. Sizes of say 1024×768 should yield good results.
Where can you find good images? Google Images and PicSearch are both helpful. Since the public won’t see the image and it’s for personal use only, it should be fine to use any image. Here’s a search we did on Google Images to find appropriately sized nature images. You can customize this query to find other images too.
If you are considering using WorldTV for more professional applications, this new feature is a great way to brand our video content management system to your own use. Just be sure to use an image you have appropriate rights for. A good stock photo image library which offers reasonable prices is iStockphoto but another idea may be to use a client logo or a work sample.
We now offer several Professional features such as debranding the WorldTV player, increasing the number of clips in the Library and more. We expect to bring many exciting new PRO features in future. Visit our PRO Store for the latest options and prices.
Read More