Broadcaster » news

New RC

Broadcaster — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:15:19 +0000

Broadcaster 1.8.RC3

Broadcaster — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:05:57 +0000

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

Broadcaster Stats

Broadcaster — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:50:10 +0000

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

Announcement about 1.8

Broadcaster — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:11:50 +0000

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

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.
Top News Stories – You can choose to have your top news stories automatically appear on any of your broadcaster pages.
Comment Notification – Let you know when new people have commented and they need to be approved.
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.

Bug Fix

Broadcaster — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:57:31 +0000

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.

1.7.8 Release

Broadcaster — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:28:01 +0000

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.

Bug Fix

Broadcaster — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:11:49 +0000

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.

Internet Explorer 6 Support

Broadcaster — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:01:48 +0000

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.

Amazon S3 Issues

Broadcaster — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:32:37 +0000

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

7:06 AM PDT A small number of requests to Amazon S3 may be experiencing increased latencies or time-outs due to increased DNS latency on a small percentage of requests from outside of Amazon EC2. We are working on addressing the DNS issues.

8:42 AM PDT DNS latencies have returned to normal. We will continue to monitor global DNS latencies closely.

Version 1.7

Broadcaster — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:50:45 +0000

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.