Hi folks, I wanted to let everyone know the development team has been hard at work adding new features and making improvements to the Zenither site. This is possible due to the investments that folks have been making into our campaign, allowing us to keep our development team working on new stuff for Zenither. We expect to make a close soon on the funds which have currently been invested so that we may pay our developers for the work they have been doing, and we will make an announcement about this in our next update.
This morning we launched several features and I’m excited to let you know about them!
This update includes:
1. Perma-links for Stations, Shows and Episodes Pages: Originally the Zenither web app was a single-page app. This meant when you loaded a Station page, or looked at Future Releases or clicked on an Episode Watch page the browser URL bar never updated to show a permalink extension. This made it difficult for people to share sub-pages within the Zenither web app.
Now if you go to www.zenither.tv you will be able to see extensions for every page. As an example if you want to watch the Music 247 station you can go directly to its station page http://zenither.tv/music247 by clicking on this perma-link!
You can also watch a specific show by going to its Show Page. An example is the Show Page for 80’s MixTape, http://zenither.tv/music247/80smixtape
You can also watch episodes directly at their episode watch page, such as http://zenither.tv/music247/80smixtape/tape1sidea
Publishers can customize the URLs of any Station, Show or Episode they create by filling out a field on the edit menu for each type of page.
2. Display Name added to user profiles: Registered Viewer accounts can now set a Display Name from the ‘My Profile’ menu for when they comment or chat on videos, rather than use their personal names. The comment and chat features are not implemented on the live site yet but are coming soon.
3. Change password feature: User accounts can now change their passwords from the ‘My Profile’ menu.
4. Upload Videos features: A feature has been added for Publisher accounts allowing them to upload videos to a connected JW Player account. Videos can be added in two ways; the first is to upload the file from your computer and the second is to enter a YouTube video URL and upload through our servers. This latter feature should make it very easy for YouTube creators to port their video libraries to monetize through Zenither.
5. Station Subscriptions: Registered Viewer accounts can now subscribe to a Station by clicking the heart icon next to that Station’s name in the search menu or from the Station page.
Subscribing to a Station will make that Station appear in your Subscribed Stations list in the TV Guide and will also provide you with notifications from the Station owner in the Status updates feed (coming soon!)
Presently we have only a handful of Stations in Zenither and all of these Stations are shown in the TV Guide under the ‘Free Stations’ section of the TV Guide page. In a future version we will feature a handful of Stations by default in the TV Guide, and the rest of the Stations that compose the TV Guide will be customized for registered Viewers based on their subscriptions. We expect this will make it easier for people to follow the content of stations they want to watch regularly while still having the option to search for other shows and stations and watch them, similar to how people search, subscribe and watch videos on platforms like YouTube.
The development team is working every day on a bunch of new features and we expect to have completed most of the features we mention on our campaign page by the end of January. Stay tuned for future updates and thank you again to those who have invested into our company. You are helping us improve this application!
Carey Martell
President, Martell Broadcasting Systems, Inc.
