September 12, 2007

Rolling Widget Updates

We’ve been quietly rolling out a bunch of widget upgrades over the past month or so and we will be completing the last of these major changes by Monday. The most noticeable change has clearly been the improved controls and the simplified navigation to both videos within the channel as well as channels within the widget/network. We’ve been trying to simplify our player (while it seems that everyone else is trying to make theirs more complicated). We think this is crucial as we begin migration of the player to other platforms like iPhone etc.

Player
Video Navigation should now be much easier with all the clutter removed. You can navigate within the current video and between videos in a channel using the control panel at the bottom of the video area. You can also see progress within the current video, change volume, and skip directly back to the beginning of the current video. Finally, you can now see the channel and video information in one panel by clicking on the ‘info’ button on the bottom left and link back to the video source by clicking the logo bug in the bottom right hand corner. Changing channels or videos is achieved by clicking the blue buttons at the top of the player.

Channel/Video Guides
Once you click on Channels or Videos you will be taken to the channel or video guides. At the top of these screens you will see the Cancel button that will return you to watching your last Channel and Video as well as some Channel/Video tools. These are the simple black buttons at the top of the screen. Within the channel changing screen, these buttons allow you to create a new widget, add/subtract channels to/from existing widgets, recommend channels to others, and save channels as favorites. Similar options are available on the video selection screen. With these additions, the widget is moving towards managing almost all of the functions of the cozmo.tv site.  We’ve also simplified channel/video navigation by allowing you to click on the art and have the corresponding channel/video center in the player.

Search
You’ll also notice that a blue ‘Search’ button has appeared in the top left hand corner of the channel/video guides. You can now search for a channel or a specific video directly from the widget. Results will be displayed on the familiar channel or video guides. Just do a simple search and it should become clear in seconds how the thing works. You can also access popular, saved, recent, created and other channel/video groups right from this page. However, you will need to register within the player for these categories to save channels/videos between sessions.

There are a few more tweaks and changes to make to complete this process, but we are almost there and should be ready to announce the new player next week. Let us know what you think.

September 11, 2007

Multiple Live Branded Widgets

Phew, we’ve been rolling our new branded widgets pretty quickly and we have a ton more in the pipeline. Over the past couple of weeks we had Neurosonic, FaberDrive, Love Arcade, Hellyeah, YungBerg and 50Cent all go live. 50cent has been especially prolific on the traffic side given his impending album release and MTV Music award appearance. We also love the was Neurosonic has incorporated their player into their page.  Hopefully this will serve as a model for other artists. 

You can expect a lot more of the artist widgets to be rolling out over the next few months as we gear up this effort.