Broadcaster

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.

Broadcaster now has mp4/H.264 support for video.  Before now, only flv’s could be uploaded in the video sections of the site.  Now it will also accept mp4/H.264

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.

In broadcaster it used to be that a video ad could only be linked to ’stories’.  Once linked, broadcaster would randomly select on of those videos before every article was viewed.  This was simple and worked reliable, but lacked fine grain control.  Starting in version 1.7.2 of broadcaster, you have more control over that.  Instead of seeing a single check box for stories, you see this.

Show Categories to Select

After Clicking on Show Categories to Select

You can select your broadcaster categories that you would like to have this ad run before.

Questions

What if a category does not have any ads?

This does two things.  It will turn off autoplay for those articles.  Secondly, no ad will be show, it will go straight to the video.

How are these videos selected?

They are all weighted evenly and selected randomly, at least as randomly as computers can generate.

What if I have a video per category for an advertiser?

It’s best to create several ads for them and link to the right category.  In doing this, you should come up with and stick to a convention.

OpenSearch is a way to let web browsers know how to search your website.  Most of you are aware that pretty close to your address bar, there is a box to search google, yahoo, or live.   If your website is setup for opensearch, your users can choose to add your site to opensearch if they choose.

Broadcaster is opensearch aware.

The highlighted Search box means I can add a new search engine

Now I can search my broadcaster site from the browser

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.

Version 1.6 of Broadcaster has been released.  This release includes a number of small enhancements and one big new feature.

• Fixed the login redirect bug
• Added ability to interface with gas buddy
• Accordion is now faster
• Twitter

The big new feature is twitter.  On the dashboard of broadcaster you can now see how many people are following you and what people are saying.

And then on the from you articles sections, you can directly tweet about a story

Once you click on the sky blue t, you will see this screen.

Welcome to the Broadcaster.  Whether your a user or just insterested in our software, stay tuned.  This blog will offer tips, tricks and product annocuments.