Thursday 9 February 2012

Rolling out a refreshed video page and player

Exciting times, as we continue our design refresh with a big update to our video pages. With the new look we want to bring greater focus to the video area, increase the contrast between the video and its immediate surroundings. In the process, we're rolling out an updated Flash video player. We believe that the resulting viewing experience is much better overall and definitely looks nicer.



The new video page with its reorganized player and chat brings better support for widescreen (16:9) video, as the layout is automatically adjusted. We've also gathered all sharing-features in a single menu underneath the player.

Links to interesting times


A neat feature that we also rolled out is sharing of video links with timestamps – great if you want to point your friends to a specific part of a longer broadcast.

You can quickly create time-links through the share menu on a broadcast's page or by right clicking in the Flash video player and choosing "Copy broadcast URL for current time".

If you manually want to make a link to 1 minute and 9 seconds into the video, you can take the normal link and add #t=1min9s to make a link like bambuser.com/v/2279611#t=1min9s.

To make your life even easier, the chat also includes new time links. When you watch an on-demand video and follow a replay of the chat, you may click on the time of any chat message to seek directly to that time in the video.



Improved follow system


Added to each broadcast page and embedded video player is the option to let all viewers follow (subscribe to) the broadcaster. It's even possible to follow a broadcaster without signing up, which is great for broadcasters who have an audience where not everybody is on Bambuser.

We hope you enjoy these updates and please feel free to give us feedback. This is just the beginning, we have more great features coming!