It’s been a long couple of months of development, but we’re beginning to roll out a bunch of new stuff… We’ll be taking down our production server for about 24 hours starting this afternoon.

So, here are the updates to the CozmoTV service that you should expect this week and over the next 2-3 weeks:

1. RSS Channels: We will be releasing an upgrade to our channel lineup this week. As part of this release, we will be adding approximately 1,400 RSS based channels to our network. These include such classics as Rocketboom, Goodnight Burbank, Wallstrip and others. This list will continue to grow now that the infrastructure is in place and you can expect to see 500+ new channels appear every couple of weeks or so for the next few months. As these channels are driven by RSS, you’ll also see them updated regularly.
2. Celebrity Channels: We will be releasing a dozen new celebrity channels/widgets over the next month as we gear up a promotion over at MySpace. As we launch each of these networks I will post about them and include a link to the promoted MySpace profile. We’ll also be running some  promotions along side these new channels which I’ll explain as we launch them.
3. Custom Networks: We have also simplified embedding of widgets by removing the registration requirement. We are moving towards a model than allows you to modify the introduction animation of the widget and create your own branded television network. When someone grabs one of your widgets to embed in another site, branding and channel lineup will automatically follow. I’ll be writing a longer post about this next week as the first of these networks come online.
4. Blip.tv Support: We have also added Blip.tv support. About 350 of the new channels are Blip.tv channels and more will follow.
5. Search is Finally Fixed: We’ve had an issue with search for some time that resulted in none of the user channels showing up. We have been pushing an update off until we could rebuild the entire search service as the old search service was not scaling properly. We’ve finally finished that update so now you will see all different types of channels show up under related when you do a search.
6. New Server: We’ve also deployed on a new server so there should be some performance improvements overall to the site. We’ll see if these performance enhancements survive the roll out of our new widgets…

We will be testing these changes out over the next month as we roll out the rest of the upgrades to the service. You can also expect the following before we announce version 2 publicly and make too much noise about the improved service.

7. Widget Skin: We are also going to be rolling out some changes to the skin of the widget. First, we have introduced a footer for the widget. We had been working to keep the player skinless, but people were having too much trouble finding the links under the Menu. Now the embed link, registration/sign in link, and fullscreen link are all visible along the bottom of the player. We have also made a significant improvement to the overall look and feel of the widget controls as well. Below are some screen shots of the new widget interface. You can expect these changes to go into effect over the next few weeks.
8. Wordpress Integration: We will be ensuring that CozmoTV widgets can be embedded in hosted Wordpress environments.
9. Website Upgrade: We will be making some changes to the overall interface at http://cozmo.tv over the next month that should make things a little easier to understand (especially channel/widget creation). We have a wholesale re-factoring of the interface to accomplish, but until Joel gets back from his honeymoon,  we’re not going to make a run for it:)