Music 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 MoreWorldTV’s Online TV guide to Barack Obama’s Inauguration
Today is a truly historical day as Barack Obama becomes the first African American to take the Oval Office, becoming America’s 44th President. Millions of people will be watching from around the globe and we here at WorldTV just wanted to give you a bit of a low-down as to where you can watch the proceedings online.
Catch it here with our mobile phone broadcasting partners @ Qik.com or at the internet’s most extensive coverage with C-SPAN, or flip between a number of international perspectives on the inauguration, including the BBC World News, Al Jazeera English, euronews, C-SPAN and France 24 @ Livestation (download required), or watch with with MSNBC, Ustream, Joost, CBS, CNN, Terra in Spanish or The New York Times.
For a factual look at Barack, check out WorldTV.com’s History of Obama and for a few laughs with the new President see WorldTV.com’s Obama TV
Read MoreAdvertising on WorldTV / Google Adsense
The launch of our new advertising platform in December was a great success. More than 400 of our users have now inputted their own Google Adsense code into their channels, allowing them to earn money from their channels, wherever they are in the world. Reaction from our users has been universally positive.
Our goal has always been to create an innovative platform that empowers anyone to easily become a video publisher and earn money from their creations if they wish – hence the name for the system WorldTV Empower™.
Regrettably, a number of channels on WorldTV which carry advertising have been deemed by Google to not be in compliance with Google Adsense Policies – these are policies which specify the kind of content that may not have advertising carried against it. Examples of content that is not allowed include alcohol, excessive profanity, copyrighted content, gambling and adult themed content.
With over 100,000 channels on WorldTV it is not possible for us to monitor every channel by hand. For this reason we have spent considerable time and resources developing an automated system that actively scans and disables advertising on channels which may be in violation of Google Adsense Policies. This system attempts to replicate Google’s own automated system for flagging inappropriate content, and has been in place since the ad platform launched on Dec 8th.
The system is backed up by a manual system which allows us to disable advertising on channels that we become aware of, or which we are notified about, as having inappropriate content for Google Adsense, and which can further train the automated system to make it better.
Despite these efforts, we were notified yesterday by Google that there are channels on WorldTV showing advertising which are not in compliance with their guidelines – specifically channels with copyrighted content. As a result, Google has disabled ad serving to WorldTV and we have disabled the ad platform on our end.
We are attempting to work through these issues with Google and hope we can find a satisfactory resolution. We remain committed to providing progressive and innovative options for all our users and welcome your comments, thoughts and input.
Read MoreWorldTV on Techcrunch France and USA
Our recent news announcement about the new EPG feature was cross-posted to Techcrunch.com on Friday and earned a separate review on Techcrunch France.
We have many loyal users in France and some 2,000 French channels. A translation of the Techcrunch FR article is below and we’re grateful to Alain Eskenazi for his ongoing coverage.
“WorldTV is on a roll. We last wrote about WorldTV a few months ago, the service that allows you to aggregate videos from different platforms like Google Video, YouTube, Metacafe, MySpace and AOL, and create your own TV channel. The long-term goal of WorldTV is to cross the divide in future to web browsers on WiFi enabled TV sets and games consoles.
With this in mind, WorldTV this week launched an EPG feature that lets you view the programs of other channels without having to navigate elsewhere (more on EPG’s here), making the user experience close to that encountered on cable, for example.
WorldTV also launched an advertising platform in early December; allowing producers to monetize their channels inserting their Google Adsense code. All details (in French) on this new platform here.
The concept of WorldTV goes a little against the current trend of traditional video sharing platforms, yet WorldTV is having some success; Alx Klive, the CEO of WorldTV reveals that more than 100,000 channels have already been established on the platform by 70,000 users from 190 countries including over 2,000 in France. The site claims 600,000 monthly visitors. The company has recently reduced the number of employees and spending by 50% to achieve break even.”
Read MorePopular Italian technology site gives WorldTV the thumbs up
Italia SW is a popular Italian technology site and revisited WorldTV for a review following the launch of our recent EPG feature. A translation of the article is below…
“Remember WorldTV? WorldTV is an aggregator of video clips found on YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, MySpace and AOL. Compared to the hundreds of other Video Aggregators found on the Internet WorldTV has proven to be an innovative product, because anyone can create their own custom channel inserting links to favorite videos, all hosted on a video sharing portal.
YouTube is embracing HD video (YouTube has been testing HD video for months) and WorldTV is innovating as well by launching new features.
When we last reviewed WorldTV on Italy SW, WorldTV was a small startup, but now it has over 100,000 channels and also 600,000 users each month. Comparing the numbers of WorldTV to those of these other startups, people might snigger, but this is a victory because this site does not host any videos. Videos are streamed from the main video sharing and embedding sites.
What’s new at WorldTV? The first thing to tell you about is the new player – where a new sidebar is located on the left for the scrolling of videos. The sidebar provides a user experience similar to that of browsing the channels on a Web TV station, but it is individual video clips presented in a specific order or random. Also new on WorldTV is a sidebar on the right – a random list of stations determined using geo-location. This means that we have a high probability of finding stations created by users of our own nationality.
WorldTV is a Web Application to try because we are not just limited to video input, but we can also record broadcasts from our webcam. The most advanced technology is that you can also broadcast programs from your phone, in which case you will need an account on qik.com.”
Read MoreWorldTV picked as Top 100 site by the Guardian
In its first update to the list in two years, the UK’s Guardian newspaper has picked WorldTV.com as a Top 100 site in the World for 2009. Right alongside the BBC’s iPlayer, YouTube, Joost and Vimeo.
We’re proud and just a little humbled to be in such prestigious company, and are very grateful to the Guardian for their inclusion.
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