Oooh ooh ooh . . . worldtv

. . . oooh . . . I get really excited sometimes. Yesterday I found a wild internet site . . . and I just have to share it with you. If you upload videos to YouTube or any other video-sharing sites you may be interested in this site – it’s called worldtv.com

This site allows you to grab videos from just about anywhere on the net and play them back in a continuous sequence, in full-screen mode. I made two channels in no time at all, about ten minutes to set up the first channel and only five to set up the second. They both contain about fifteen three or four-minute video clips – so that’s nearly two one-hour programs. It is easy, and quick, to select the clips and add them to a library or a playlist; you can reorder them, add to them, rename them or delete them.

The title of the clip appears at the start and at the end of playback. You can pause a clip or move to the next or previous one. The playback window is already a large one, but worldtv allows you to play at full-screen size. You can share either clips or channels, or embed a full-screen channel on your webpage. There are no advertisements at all. A worldtv logo appears between clips or when the clip needs to buffer. There is even an option to remove or replace this logo. (worldtv.com has provided such an efficient mechanism to present our video clips, without any other advertising, that we are quite happy to leave their logo there – and worldtv is such an intrinsic name that it gives our artists global status.)

You can add clips from a web search or by entering the urls of the clips; you can also add clips from worldtv’s own library of clips – and you can record from webcam direct to worldtv

I have tried many other video sharing sites and most of them only allow you to play one clip at a time; you know – select a clip – press play – select another clip – press play. But with world tv you can create a playlist and play up to one hundred clips, one after the other, in any order you like.

There are some other sites that let you set up channels, such as mogulus.com – we have a channel there at mogulus.com/curlytv – but it has been very tedious to set up. Each operation seems to need a screen redraw; we haven’t done as much there as we would have liked. We also have a continuous sequence of clips at livevideo.com/liveshow/chrisloft - but I’ve noticed that this plays the audio out of sync with the video, and it gets more and more out of sync as you watch more clips. 

worldtv.com is very simple to use and extremely fast; it uses drag and drop for many functions and has a well-laid out interface that is very intuitive to use. At present we just have video clips. If I had some intro and outro takes, then I could present a program with talking heads doing the introductions to make it a bit more interesting. The facility to add content from a webcam is a very useful feature. We have set up channels for two bands, Dot Comma Dash and FLuX; we will add some more channels in the next few days – (check out ChillTV and SiliconTV).

This has uses for other programming content besides playlists of video clips. You could easily use worldtv to set up a News program, a cooking show, or anything at all interesting. If you use the default videos when setting up your station, the first one is an interesting clip about the history of televison, worth watcing in context with our media course. The founder of worldtv, Aix Klive, was also one of the instigators of the Millenium Photo Project – which all media students would be familiar with. N’est ce pas?

Another website I came across yesterday and worth mentioning is freepath.com – I haven’t had a chance to set anything up with it yet (it is still in beta/demo) – this site has some potent potential. You can set up a sequence of anything you can find on your computer or on the net – videoclips, web pages, text, office, word and excel documents, pdf documents , powerpoint documents, graphics, audio files – you can select individual elements from these files and string them all together. I like the fact that you can open PowerPoint or pdf files and grab individual frames from them; you can select start and end points for videos. Freepath is a presentation tool, I think it has enormous possibilities; have a look at their demo and see for yourself.

These are two great websites. I didn’t come across them by chance – I read about them at mashable.com

adios
Chris Loft in the blogloft