JTV Bay to Breakers Team Update

So far here's our awesome JTV B2B team lineup:

TheJwayShow
Pceasy
Lifedoc (Patrick)
Justin (thecrashtd)
WillKirkpatrick
Krystyl
Justin
Lisa
Cheri
Angela
Morgan
Sinclair

Thanks Krystyl for putting this all together! There are still a few spots left, so if anyone else wants to join please let us know asap. We'll be mentioned in the official Bay to Breakers press release as the way to watch the race live!

New JTV Staff Member: Joseph!

We'd like everyone to welcome Joseph to the site as the 8th member of the JTV team! Joseph is a systems administrator, and with his help we should be improving site stability a lot in the weeks to come. Welcome Joseph!

Video Guide Contest!

We're holding a contest to see who can create the best Justin.tv-related video tutorials. These videos will be linked to prominently on the site, and will be added to the playlist on justin.tv/help.

The videos should be screencasts or appropriate formats with voice narration explaining the features of Justin.tv. They should be in an informative, step-by-step format geared towards new users unfamiliar with using Justin.tv

The winners will receive a Justin.tv prize pack, including Justin.tv hats, stickers, shirts (signed by the Justin.tv team if you desire), and a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 webcam.

There are nine categories for videos. One winner will be selected per category, the best tutorial videos chosen by the Justin.tv team.

Categories:

-How to Broadcast Live Video
-How to Create a Highlight & Browse Archives
-How to Create and Design a Channel & Profile
-How to Navigate Through the "Settings" Options
-How to Use Chat Tools & Moderation
-How to Use Advanced Broadcasting Tools like Webcam Programs and Various Video Sources
-How to Promote Your Channel & Get More Viewers
-How to Use Privacy Features
-How to Use Friends/Favorites/Messaging/Bulletins & other Social Network Features

Rules:

-Video must be under 10:00 minutes in length and uploaded to YouTube.
-You may either broadcast the tutorial live on Justin.tv, then send the episode to YouTube, or upload it straight there.
-No limit to video submissions or categories.
-An individual is able to win in multiple categories, however any extra prizes beyond a single prize pack will be awarded at the discretion of Justin.tv staff.
-Deadline for submissions is Friday, May 16th.
-Winners will be announced by Phil the following week on Thursday May 22nd during Justin.tv Office Hours.

SUBMISSION FORM AND LINK: https://jtvawards.wufoo.com/forms/justintv-video-tutorial-submission-form



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Bulletins, Highlight Controls, and more!

This Friday we've released a brand new feature to Justin.tv: Bulletins! JTV Bulletins are a way to send a post to all your friends and fans, and can be used for many things, including:

• News and Announcements - Let your fans and friends know about upcoming events!
• Blogging - Write posts that will appear on your profile! (and soon, your channel!)

You can use any kind of HTML and Flash embeds (Youtube, etc) in your posts. Bulletins are sent to your friends and fans instantly.

We've also released some controls for highlights, which let broadcasters disable the ability for their viewers to send their highlights to Youtube. Broadcasters can also disable the ability for viewers to create highlights. Let us know if there are any more privacy controls you'd like to see.

Finally, we just built a new web interface for international translations. If you speak another language and would like to help Justin.tv work better in other countries, please volunteer.

Have a great weekend,

Justin

Community Director?

Greetings,

For a number of months Phil has been working double duty as the Justin.tv Producer, helping to organize special events and promotions on the site and Justin.tv Community Liaison, running office hours, sending broadcaster newsletters, etc.

We are thinking about splitting these tasks so Phil can focus on production/music events and hiring a new Community Director. Some of their responsibilities would include: planning community contents and events, answering info@justin.tv emails, maintaining the Justin.tv frontpage, keeping track of and distributing JTV broadcasting kits, creating guides and help videos, etc.

But before we take this step we want to know:

What would you like to see in a Justin.tv Community Director?

Respond in the comments of this post and we can have a mini-discussion about the role a new Community Director might play at Justin.tv.

Thanks!

Michael

A Secret Justin.tv Strategy???

AlleyInsider's Michael Learmonth reports on our thoughts and goals for Justin.tv in an exclusive interview with our very own Michael Seibel.

Comments from the "peanut gallery"?

Startup school

We had a great time at startup school this year. We broadcasted the whole event to a global audience of hackers and entrepreneurs who watched the talks and chatted about them on justin.tv as a substitute for being there in person. Thanks guys, it was great fun filming the event for you and hanging-out in the chat room!

I've split up the broadcast into individual episodes, one for each talk. We lost a few minutes here and there due to our flaky wireless connection and some coffee that got spilled on our power strip (!) but most of it's there.

Do also check out the coverage that our fellow YCers omnisio are putting online soon.

Here are the talks:

David Lawee

Sam Altman

Jack Sheridan

Paul Graham

Greg McAdoo

David Heinemeier Hansson

Paul Buchheit

Jeff Bezos

Mike Arrington

Marc Andreessen

Peter Norvig

New Features and Bug fixes

Another stressful week for the JTV team, but we made our release. Here's the big things today:

• JTV in Spanish and French. Thanks to Norah, Laura N., and Arnaud for helping us translate!
• Chat history. You can now browse chat history before March 25th, 08, by clicking the "History" link in the chat menu. Next week we will start displaying recent chat history (we are crunching the logs right now).
  
• Badges for completing your profile and channel pages. All you have to do to get yours is go through the steps on your JTV home.
• User lists will now stay synced on chat.

We're almost finished with our server migrations. Next week should be the last week we're moving things around, so thanks to everyone in the community for bearing with us while we improve JTV.

Have a good weekend,

Justin

Problems with Flash Media Encoder

Sorry to any broadcasters who are having problems broadcasting with FME. Because we moved our servers to a new location yesterday, you might have to clear your DNS cache / reboot before FME will work. We're also actively working on making the video servers respond much more quickly to FME. Until that is fixed (sometime tonight or tomorrow hopefully) you might have to try connecting a few times if your connection is timing out.

Thanks for your patience,

Justin

Justin.tv Bay to Breakers Team!

JTV broadcaster Krystyl has graciously volunteered to organize a JTV team to compete in the annual SF Bay to Breakers race! The race is May 18th and goes through downtown SF all the way to other side of the city (some 12km). Any JTV'ers who are in SF or will be here for that weekend are welcome to join the team (just shoot an email to justin@justin.tv). For those of you who haven't experienced the awesome time that is Bay to Breakers this is a once in a lifetime opportunity! For those of you not in SF, don't worry, we'll broadcast the event live!

UPDATE: We need to know if you want to be on the team by April 25th; please email Krystyl at info@krystyl.net.

Help Translate Justin.tv!

We rolled out our first translation on Friday (German), and we have various volunteers working on Russian, French, Italian and Japanese, hopefully some of which we'll be able to release next week. But we still need more help! If you speak Korean, Chinese, Spanish, or any other language and want to help out JTV, email justin@justin.tv and help us translate!

Have a great Sunday,

Justin

Big move complete - working on some bugs

Greetings All,

So today we installed about $50,000 worth of new video servers and moved our web and chat servers to a new location with a bigger bandwidth pipe. What this means for the average Justin.tv user is an even faster site with much less downtime.

However, like all big server moves a couple bugs have crept in that we are working very hard to fix at this moment.

Here is a list of the known issues on the site:

/Home does not load correctly
Flash Media Encoder broadcasting is down (eta for fix 9:00pm pacific)
Userlists in chat are inaccurate
Fans list doesn't load
IRC access has been redirected to chat.justin.tv
Youtube imports to playlists

Once again - we are actively working on these bugs and we will continue to update you on our progress.

Have a great night!

- Michael

Translations and IM

After cranking away for the past two weeks, we were finally ready today to push our big release. This week we've rolled out several things that have been requested for a while:

• Translations - The site is now available in English and German. More languages will be coming every week (if you speak English and another language and would like to help Justin.tv out translating the site, email justin@justin.tv).
• IM - You can now IM your friends from any chat room. Just type /im username to open a new IM window, and chat away!
• Promotion Wizard - Get helpful hints on your home page about the various tools we provide to help you promote your channel and get tons of viewers!

Hope you guys like the new features. Have a great weekend!

Justin

Network issues fixed!

The company that runs the facility that houses our servers was having a significant network problem. As a result, our servers were experiencing a high level of packet loss - which made the website appear down for a large number of people.

We worked with this company and addressed the problem.

Justin.tv service is back online.

We apologize for the outage and thank you for holding tight.