Broadcaster

Related Stories

Today a new Broadcaster 1.9 release candidate will be pushed live.  The big news in this RC is related stories.  Often times a breaking news item has several itertive information updates, sometimes over several days.  When small details emerge, it’s logical enough to update your story with that detail, but with large, it’s most times better to author a new article; that’s where related stories kicks in.

Using Related Stories

When editing or adding a new story, you will see a new box in the right sidebar labeled Article Fellowship.  The purpose of this box is two fold.  One is select the story that this is a followup to.  You will shown a list of 50 of the most recent stories before the one you are editing.  The other use is to show you if this story has been been used as a follow-up.  If it has, chances are you want to click on it to edit that story instead.

Changes to the viewer

On stories that have no follow-up, there are no changes.  If the story has a newer story that follows it up, than a small box showing is seen on the top.  If the story is an update to older story, that is shown on the bottom.  Both can happen as well.  Below is example of both.

Follow-ups, what the user sees

Version 1.8.RC2 made it out into the wild today. There are two major changes: Facebook and Recent Stories, as as some minor changes.

Recent Stories
On the article pages, under the video and/or images, there is now a box that is somewhat small that allows scrolling. This stories are just your top 20 published stories.

Facebook
Not everybody has Facebook connect enabled, if you don’t have it enabled, call Sephone and ask for it.  With facebook connect enabled, users can comment via their facebook account, instead of typing in a name/email/website everytime they comment on a story.  This feature also gives users the ability to post their comment back to their facebook wall to let their friends see what they said on your site.  Here are some visual differences, click to enlarge.

What it looks like to use facebook connect for the first time to a user

Posting a new comment with facebook

What the admin area looks like when moderating facebook comments

The way facebook comments look to other users

Right are some quick Broadcaster stats since it’s first launch on February 18th.

• 10, 623 total news stories
• 2542 new stories (many were imported)
• 1022 uploaded news videos
• 1.1 Terabytes of video streamed
• 1001 user submitted comments
• 814 uploaded images
• 337 weather reports filled
• 109 user submitted weather images

Broadcaster version 1.8 is slated to be released this summer, here are a few of the planned enhancements.

1. Podcasting – Allow you to upload various mp3’s (up to five) that are switched together into one file and then presented as a podcast that can be submitted to the iTunes music store.
2. Top News Stories – You can choose to have your top news stories automatically appear on any of your broadcaster pages.
3. Comment Notification – Let you know when new people have commented and they need to be approved.
4. Facebook Connect – Let your views comment with their facebook account, instead of having to put their name, email & site everytime they post a comment.  Also, we can pull that user’s avatar from facebook.

More details to come when 1.8 is released.

Where was a bug discovered when uploading a new video that is not a news, sports or weather feature ad.  This bug has been addressed.

Sorry for any inconvince.

While the the release of version 1.7.8 of broadcaster has very little change, there are two notable things.

Link to article from comments.

Now when you are approving comments, the title of the story is linked, so you can view the article.

Non-published stories.

Now, if you try to feature an article on the home page that is not published, you will get an error message alerting you to publish the story first.

Version 1.7.5 of broadcaster has been released.  It’s merely a bug fix release.  All of the bug fixes were involving video ads, most notable, the ability to enter the url for sponsers.

In an effort to make broadcaster more usable, internet explorer 6 support has been enhanced.  The broadcaster admin as well as the front side now have increased usability in IE6.  For more information about Sephone and IE6, please read our previous blog post, Internet Explorer 6 Support.

As some of you are aware, this morning there are some issues on the video upload area.  Under broadcaster it uses the amazon S3 service for storage of videos.  For whatever reason this morning, the connection between broadcaster and amazon is not doing so hot.  We are shooting about 50/50.  About half of the time the upload works, about half it does not.  When it does not work, you get the page below after you upload.

Failed upload in broadcaster

When it works, you should see a screen like this.

Video Upload worked

At this time we are working to figure out why the connection to amazon does not work all of the time.  We will let you know more as we do.  For the now, just try to upload again, it works about half the time.

UPDATE: Amazon is reporting that s3 is back to normal.  Right from the horse’s mouth

In theory, this release should have been without notice.  Only minor changes to the dashboard.  The changes were largely to caching engine.  This is to support multiple instances of the application.