Say hello to JTV Gaming

Today we're launching our first Justin.tv sub-site and it's focused on the gaming community. First, take a look at it.



One of the most common requests we get from users is for more community-oriented features. We've added a lot of them but always struggled with really making customized experiences for the different communities on the site. A couple weeks ago we decided to start a new project to make it much easier for us to give each community the experience that makes the most sense. The result was sub-sites and the first one is gaming.justin.tv.

I'm sure everyone has noticed the great new look (thanks to Kim!), but there's more here than just a fresh coat of paint. Justin.tv sub-sites will have their own promoted content and could include custom features as well. If you look at gaming.justin.tv you'll see that all of the front page events are focused on gaming. Also, the front page player will always be playing gaming content. We'd love to hear your ideas for custom features you'd like to see. Now that there's a dedicated gaming area, we're free to build new features just for gamers that may not have been possible before.

We're excited to launch gaming.justin.tv and we're working on more sub-sites as well. A couple ideas we're already thinking about are music and social. We'll post more about those as they get closer.

HAL Awards Live this Sunday

Join The Heroes and Legends Foundation for the Let There Be Music 20th Annual Heroes and Legends Awards.

Join host JoMarie Payton for a special evening of entertainment, music, and lots of love as presenters, including Florence LaRue and Claudette Robinson, honor the legendary, and always colorful George Clinton, principal architect of P-Funk.

Other honorees and guests include recording artist Eddie Levert, entrepreneur, music and film producer Clarence Avant, TV and film star Mykelti Williamson, legendary songwriter Dennis Coffey, singer Smokey Robinson, legendary producer Quincy Jones and Motown founder Berry Gordy, Jr., and many, many more.


The festivities kick off here at 4:30pm PT with live coverage from the red carpet, followed by the ceremony at 7pm PT.

Live Chat with Diane Birch

Join us here for a live chat with singer/songwriter Diane Birch on September 30 at 8pm ET/5pm PT. She'll answer questions and chat with fans, as well as play songs from her new album "Bible Belt".



If you'd like to ask Diane a question, please submit your questions by filling out the form below. For more information on Diane, please visit her Justin.tv channel or her site.

Twitter Chat Upgrades

We have some nice Twitter goodies to tell you about today.

First, we have made the process of signing into Twitter even more secure utilizing Twitter's latest and greatest authentication system.

Second, we have added a super cool feature for broadcasters. You can now set a hashtag (#whateveryouwant) for your channel. Anytime a chatter is using Twitter chat and has opted-in to update their status, your hashtag will be added to the tweet. This will make it easier to follow and connect with fellow Justin.tv users on Twitter as well as make it possible for your broadcast to trend on Twitter.

We are going to continue improving the chatting experience with services like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

Stephen Wolfram Live Q&A today!

We were exceptionally pleased to have Wolfram|Alpha launch here live on Justin.tv it was a monumental moment! It's been incredible to watch all of the broadcasts from the Wolfram|Alpha channel here on Justin.tv.

We're pleased to have Stephen Wolfram joining us live today for a Q&A broadcast at 12pm PDT. So head over to: http://www.justin.tv/wolframalpha - To chat live!

Archives get a Massive Upgrade

We have been working on some big improvements to the way archives work, making them more useful for both broadcasters and viewers. Archives have been limited to 5 minute segments, as a result broadcast archives were often chopped up into many segments. This was annoying for both viewers and broadcasters and so we decided to make it better. We also heard from broadcasters that you wanted your past broadcasts to be available for longer than 7 days, and we heard from viewers who wanted to be able to watch more past broadcasts from their favorite broadcasters. We are happy to announce we are addressing all of these issues making the experience better for everyone.

So what's new? For starters, your past archives will seamlessly migrate to the new system, you won't have to change a thing. Once the new system launches, archives will no longer be limited to 5 minutes (yay!). We are upping the limit from 5 minutes to a whopping 2 hours. This will make it much easier to watch complete past broadcasts and make it easier for broadcasters to embed them elsewhere on the web. We are also now going to store up to 24 hours worth of past broadcasts for each broadcaster. To illustrate the change, if you broadcast a 1 hour show once a week in the old system we would only keep the last week's show. But in the the new system we will keep nearly 6 months worth of your past broadcasts. We are also updating the channel pages to show both past broadcasts and clips as well as making it easier to rename and manage your past broadcasts. This is a massive upgrade.

The long and short of it is, we are making past broadcasts easier to view and access (no more 5 minute segments) and giving broadcasters a deeper back catalog of their content so new viewers can enjoy older broadcasts. All of these upgrades combined make it more convenient to watch past broadcasts as well as share them elsewhere on the web.

We can't wait to roll out these changes, and will be doing so within a few weeks. As you can imagine, this is a big upgrade and we are checking and double checking the systems to make sure everything is right, but we wanted to let you know about the changes now because we are so excited and would love your feedback. To go along with all these upgrades, we are upgrading what we call these previously recorded broadcasts from Archives to Past Broadcasts.

If you have any questions about the changes please feel to let us know!

Negative favourites bug squished!

Victory!

Thanks to our awesome developers, we've tracked down, squished and normalized everything effected by the negative fans bug on channel pages.

We know this has effected quite a few channels and we're sorry for the troubles! This shouldn't happen any longer and everyone who had a channel that was effected by this bug has their channel favourites restored to the number it should be.

Thanks for your patience, you're all awesome as ever!

Romance, Sarcasm, Math and Language? Randall Munroe does it all

Not many things ranks cooler on the geek cred scale than getting a chance to meet Randall Munroe, the suave and geeky genius behind the popular webcomic XKCD.

This week, Randall will be in San Francisco during an EFF fundraiser to celebrate the release of XKCD: Volume 0.

Reddit will be there to interview Randall live, here on Justin.tv during the charity event! You can get a chance to get your question answered by Randall Munroe! Just head over to Reddit.com and submit your question to be voted for! You can ask him anything, like... "Has Stallman ever attacked you with his samurai sword?" or perhaps, "Have you ever had a life or death encounter with a velociraptor?"

If you're in the San Francisco bay area, you should try to head over and attend the event yourself!

You can Order tickets here. Starts at 7 p.m. at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. Admission is $30, and attendees must be 21+. There will also be a special pre-reading VIP reception at 6pm!

So get your questions in gear, submit them on the Reddit thread and join us Monday September 21st at about 6pm PST: http://www.justin.tv/reddit

Check out the Reddit.com blog for more information about this event!

Two Hours Traffic, Live chat!

In celebration of the newest release of their newest album "Territory" those lovable guys from Two Hours Traffic will be doing a live Broadcast here on Justin.tv

You can check them out here: http://www.justin.tv/twohourstraffic - Wednesday September 16th at 1PM PT.

So don't forget to Join the guys here on Justin.tv!

Join Chris Koon live on Justin.tv

If you haven't had a chance to check out Chris on Justin.tv before, you have a great chance to get a special live broadcast from Chris after his hit release of the song "It Girl".

Chris will be broadcasting live on Justin.tv, Sunday September 13th at 7:30pm PS on his channel: http://www.justin.tv/chriskoon

You'll get a chance to check out his previous broadcasts on Justin.tv as well! So head over on Sunday and chat with Chris live!

"No Impact Man" Live Q&A

One day Colin Beavan woke up and asked himself "Is it possible to have a good life without wasting so much?" and for one year Colin, his wife, daughter, and dog, while living in the middle of New York City, attempted to live without making any net impact on the environment. In other words, no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets…

Since then "No Impact Man" has gone from just a blog to a full book, film and a full project from his one idea.

Sept 8th at 2pm PT (5pm ET) Colin will be live taking your questions and talking about what he's done here on Justin.tv. So don't forget to join us then to get a chance to ask Colin anything.

Alexa Vega Live Q&A

Tuesday, September 8, 2009 we're excited to have Alexa Vega joining us live on Justin.tv for a Q&A session with her fans.

Alexa is the star of the upcoming movie Broken Hill, and she's excited to be talking about this project as well as taking your questions from chat!

Don't forget to tune in Tuesday September 8th at 5pm PST for your chance to get to chat live with Alexa.