Aqui na WorldTV nós amamos nossa música, nós amamos o Brasil e parece que o Brasil nos ama. Atualmente cerca de 50,000 canais de WorldTV foram criados no Brasil – mais do que em qualquer outro país. O Brasil tem sido um dos nossos maiores paises desde o começo e português e espanhol foram os primeiros idiomas que nós acrescentamos ao suporte do WorldTV. Para comemorar o quanto o Brasil tem sido Grande, nós selecionamos alguns canais de música brasileira para que vocês tenham o prazer de ver e ouvir.

Gilberto Gil - WorldTV.com/Gilberto_Gil

Gilberto Gil has been a key figure in the development of modern music in Brazil combining traditional samba sounds with his own style and wide ranging influences including The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, African & Jamaican Music, the list goes on..  Bizarrely exiled to London in 1970 by the Brazilian government with fellow musician Caetano Veloso, while there Gil performed with musical groups including Yes, Pink Floyd, and the Incredible String Band and was later inspired by working with the likes of Stevie Wonder and Fela Kuti. After a successful musical career Gil took Government office in January 2003 as Brazil’s new Minister of Culture.

Gilberto Gil tem sido uma figura chave no desenvolvimento da música moderna do Brasil, combinando sons do samba tradicional com seu próprio estilo e uma enorme gama de influências que incluem os Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, Música Africana e Jamaicana, além de outros. Foi estranhamente exilado para Londres em 1970 pelo governo brasileiro com o companheiro músico Caetano Veloso. Enquanto morou lá, Gil tocou com grupos musicais, incluindo Yes, Pink Floyd e a incrível String Band e depois se inspirou ao trabalhar com gente como Stevie Wonder e Fela Kuti. Depois de uma carreira musical de sucesso Gil entrou para a chancelaria do governo em janeiro de 2003 como o novo Ministro da Cultura do Brasil.

Marisa Monte - WorldTV.com/Marisa_Monte

A classically trained opera singer Marisa Monte´s popularity really came to figure after the time she spent in Italy where she met producer Nelson Motta (then boyfriend) where her performer sound evolved into a mixture of Diva and Pop Rock . Much of her work has been in collaboration with other musicians/songwriters including Carlinhos Brown featured below.

A popularidade da cantora Marisa Monte que estudou ópera clássica realmente cresceu depois do período em que ela passou na Itália, onde conheceu o produtor Nelson Motta (seu namorado ). O som que ela executava evoluiu para uma mistura de Diva e Pop Rock. Muito do seu trabalho tem sido em colaboração com outros músicos/compositores, incluindo Carlinhos Brown, destacado abaixo.

Caetano Veloso - WorldTV.com/Caetano_Veloso

Heavily influenced by the bossa nova style of João Gilberto Caetano Veloso has been at the forefront of Brazilan music and with Gilberto Gil was a partly  responsible for developing Tropicalismo, a fusion of Brazilian pop, rock and  avant-garde music.  This musical movement that inexplicably resulted in Veloso and Gil spending several months in prison in 1969 afterwhich they were exiled to London.  Asked about his time there he says, “London felt dark, and I felt far away from myself.”  Errr yes, Brazil does tend to have more sunshine…

Muito influenciado pelo estilo da bossa nova de João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso tem estado na linha de frente da música brasileira e com Gilberto Gil foi responsável pelo desenvolvimento do Tropicalismo, uma fusão do pop brasileiro, rock e música de vanguarda. Esse movimento musical resultou inexplicavelmente na prisão de Veloso e Gil por vários meses em 1969, depois do que foram exilados para Londres. Perguntado sobre o tempo em que esteve lá, ele diz: “Londres era sombria e eu me sentia ausente de mim mesmo”. Errr sim, o Brasil costuma ter mais sol.

Carlinhos Brown - WorldTV.com/Carlinhos_Brown

Carlinho Brown became a percussionist from an early age with the mindful guidance of his parents.  After various collaborations in the 1980s he also cut his teeth in recording studios and began to collaborate with other artists and achieved success and international exposure as part of Caetano Veloso’s (above) band.  He was also the leader of the musical group Timbalada, a group of 100 percussionists and singers who recorded eight albums and toured various countries around the world.

Carlinhos Brown tornou-se um percussionista desde pequeno com a cuidadosa orientação de seus pais. Depois de várias colaborações nos anos 80, ele também ganhou experiência em estúdios de gravação e começou a colaborar com outros artistas e conquistou sucesso e projeção internacional como parte da banda de Caetano Veloso (acima). Ele foi também o líder do grupo musical Timbalada, um grupo de 100 percussionistas e cantores que gravou oito álbuns e percorreu vários paises do mundo.

Gilles Peterson -WorldTV.com/Gilles_Peterson

I know I know Gilles Peterson is NOT Brazilian.  However, if ever a man deserves plaudits for championing Brazilian Music in the UK then it is him.  From his early days as Talking Loud head honcho and more recently Brownswood Recordings and DJ on his weekly BBC Radio 1 show Worldwide Peterson has consistently acted as ambassador for Latin beats and his non native knowledge of their scene is second to none.

Eu sei, eu sei, Gilles Peterson NÃO é brasileiro. Entretanto, se algum homem merece aplausos por defender a Música Brasileira no Reino Unido, então ele é o próprio. Desde os primeiros dias como controlador chefe do Talking Loud e mais recentemente com o Brownswood Recordings e semanalmente como DJ no seu show Radio 1 Worldwide na BBC, Peterson tem atuado de forma constante como embaixador dos ritmos latinos e o seu conhecimento não-nativo do cenário é único.

Please feel free to suggest/recommend any other music channels on WorldTV that we have not reviewed yet @ reception@worldtv.com

Por favor sinta-se à vontade para sugerir/recomendar outros canais do WorldTV que nós ainda não examinamos em: reception@worldtv.com

Thanks to a recent blog post by Fred Wilson, we were inspired to bring forward a feature that we’ve be planning for a while.

The new feature lets you add web videos to either your library or playlist, or both, as you browse supported video sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe etc. You don’t have to be logged in to your WorldTV Editor to do this, you don’t have to copy & paste URL’s. A single click on a ‘bookmarklet’ in your web browser adds the video instantly.

Setting it up takes seconds… Under the Promote tab in your Editor you choose the type of bookmarklet that you want (Add to Library, Playlist, Both) and then you simply drag and drop the generated link to the toolbar of your web browser.

With the bookmarklet installed all you need to do is browse to a video page like the Bruno / Conan O’Brien clip above and click the bookmarklet to add the video instantly to your WorldTV channel. A confirmation message appears to tell you the video has been successfully added.

There’s all kinds of great uses for this new feature. Here are some ideas…

• If you make use of our Twitter functionality (to send tweets automatically) you can use the bookmarklet to rapidly share video finds over Twitter - without ever having to log in to your WorldTV channel
• Create a separate WorldTV channel that is solely for your personal viewing pleasure and you can save and bookmark videos for later personal viewing. This is the original idea of Fred Wilson’s ‘Watch Later Project‘ - the idea that you can bookmark videos during the day as you find them (eg at work), and sit back and watch them in the evening.
• Using WorldTV’s RSS capability the videos that you bookmark become an RSS feed. There are many uses for this including the ability to watch the videos in a media browser like Boxee.
• A cool idea is to use Xmarks to synchronize your bookmarks across all the different computers and web browsers that you use. The WorldTV bookmarklet will then appear on your home computer, work computer, laptop etc, allowing you to save and bookmark videos into WorldTV wherever you find them. (Note you don’t need to use Xmarks to do this - you could simply add the bookmarklet to each computer separately… but Xmarks makes this easy to do and is generally very cool)

For the more technically inclined, each bookmarklet is tied to the WorldTV channel you generated the bookmarklet for. So you can create different bookmarklets for different channels if you like (if you run multiple channels). We’d recommend editing the name for each bookmarklet if you do this, within your web browser, so you can differentiate between them.

Our short-term plans for this new feature are to improve the look and feel of the confirmation message that appears after you’ve clicked the bookmarklet, and make the message auto-disappear after a couple of seconds (you currently have to click a close box).

We hope you enjoy the new bookmarklet feature on WorldTV and find many creative ways of using it!

Ian Loveday was one of the pioneers of the UK house and techno scene, a DJ and music producer who is best known for his work as EON (Spice, Inner Mind, Fear is the Mindkiller) and his collaborations with S’Express, Bizarre Inc, Depthcharge and Peter ‘Baby’ Ford. He also recorded the sound effects that you hear on WorldTV when you use the live broadcasting / mobile phone video feature - it’s his voice put through a vocoder.

In honour of his life (his funeral is today) we’ve put together a channel featuring a selection of his work. There is also a discography, Myspace page, Facebook group and official website.

Ian was that rare breed of individual who you could reliably say there isn’t a person on the planet who would have a bad word to say about him. He was a genius, an innovator and an all round nice guy. He will be sadly missed.

Ian Loveday aka EON on WorldTV - worldtv.com/ianloveday

If you have content in FLV format (or any format that is supported by Flash 10 - eg MP4 or M4V) and can host those video files on a webserver, you can easily string together those files into a playlist within the WorldTV system, and generate an embeddable player that you can host on your own website. WorldTV makes this extremely easy to do. Here’s how you do it.

Step 1 - Create the FLV files
Take your video content and convert it to FLV format. There are lots of programs that will let you do this. A good (paid) option is the Flix range of encoders. These are used by many professionals. For a free option, check out this easy-to-follow guide on our Founder’s blog.

Step 2 - Host the FLV files on a webserver
WorldTV does not typically offer hosting of FLV files although we do have a hosting solution for large customers. There are many excellent hosts out there and if you are reading this you probably know the options already or have your own hosting. If you don’t, we recommend establishing a hosting account with someone like Servint (we use them) or exploring cloud based hosting using Amazon S3. A low cost host we recommend is Gearhost who have packages starting at under $10 a month for 100GB of monthly transfer. Simply upload your FLV (or MP4/MV4/H264) files to your webserver, and write down the URL for each file.

Step 3 - Paste the URL’s into the WorldTV Editor
This step couldn’t be easier. Assuming you have already established a channel (account) on WorldTV, simply paste the URL’s for each FLV file into the ‘Add by URL’ box within the WorldTV Editor. An example of a URL might be http://www.somedomain.com/mycoolvideo.flv. Each video will immediately appear within your library, complete with a thumbnail, and you can double click it right away to preview it!

Step 4 - Arrange the videos into a Playlist
Simply drag and drop your videos into the desired order within the Playlist section of the Editor

Step 5 - Generate an Embeddable Player
Using the Promote tab within the Editor choose from a range of widgets and players. Grab the embed code and put it on your site.

WorldTV really is the easiest and best method yet to create a playlist out of FLV files to embed on your website. With full H264 support, and an expanding range of player skins and options, there really is no excuse not to have video on your website!

We hope you enjoy these brilliant new supported sites and do continue to suggest other sites we should support by dropping us a line at reception@worldtv.com.

The smoke has finally cleared from this year’s awesome edition of The Global Marijuana March and The Toronto Freedom Festival. The festival featured many great performances by the assembled showcase of musical talent along with many thought provoking speeches given by the attending speakers. To see the footage captured by our team of videographers you can still go to the The Toronto Freedom Festival Channel here on WorldTV or if you prefer you can catch an encore audio presentation from our friends at DOPEfm on 93.3 CFMU McMaster Campus Radio.
Coverage of the festival will be rebroadcasted on DOPEfm on Saturday May 30th 2009 beginning at 1:30am Eastern Standard Time (Approximated) & repeating 4:30am EST (Approximated). The 90 minute production includes the following speakers from the day: Eric ‘Buzzzworthy’ Wood, Jonathan Dickinson, Dana Larsen, Marc Emery, Patrick Whyte, Sara Chekroun, Christopher Lawson, Alison Myrden & Vijay Sarma; plus the ‘themed’ music playlist of some DOPEfm favourites including: Kay & Cleary with The Chosen Few Band – What It Takes To Live, Madvillain – America’s Most Blunted, Nish Raawks – Canada’s Most Blunted, Singapore Kane – Do What I Wanna Do, Fly Guys – Fly Guys Rap.

To catch the encore audio presentation go to CFMU McMaster online or catch the live MP3 stream here. DOPEfm is also available by podcast from iTunes and directly here or here

Many thanks to all those involved and the over 30,000 people who attended the Toronto event for making the day such a smokin’ success!

If you have the ability to send video by e-mail or transmit video via Qik, you can participate. We would like to add your video to the live broadcast.

If you would like to watch the event on Saturday, follow us on Twitter or visit worldtv.com/live on Saturday afternoon.

This is part of a continuing series of experimental live broadcasts and marks the debut of WorldTV’s new Projects page. We’ve always said we will offer ‘imaginative projects that people can get involved in’. Imagination should be in abundance this Saturday…

Learn how you can contribute video and Tweets to this Saturday’s live broadcast

The second of our two new supported sites is the wonderfully diverse LiveLeak with its mandate of “Redefining The Media”. LiveLeak lets users post and share videos but unlike most video sharing sites out there, it really is super-keen to promote discussion and debate of controversial political, current affairs and real life footage of international events like wars and natural disasters. The site gives users a place to post, comment on and debate anything from citizen journalism, to celebrity gossip, to education reports, to news from the front lines of international war zones, to entertainment updates. To commemorate the addition of this awesome, original video site why not watch a collection of some of Liveleak’s most entertaining clips, according to us, here on our brand spanking new Best of LiveLeak channel.

We hope you love these excellent new supported sites and please feel free to drop us a line at reception@worldtv.com suggesting other video sites we should be supporting.

The idea was to film a special ‘tasting’ event for top London food critics and broadcast it to people around the world via the web. This is the story of how we did it, and what it might mean for WorldTV in future…

The focus of the event was Oysters and Champagne, something we knew very little about. Fortunately we had some of the best people (and palettes) in the business to enlighten and educate us. Fred Sirieix is General Manager of Galvin at Windows, a restaurant with arguably the most impressive view of London, and it was his idea to take what is normally a behind-closed-doors event and open it up to the public. It was the first time in the industry that a ’showcase’, as such events are called, had ever been live webcast, and this inspired idea resulted in a lot of interest and chatter within the restaurant world. It promised to be a groundbreaking event and a lot of fun.

From day one we knew that a completely unscripted production was needed. This wasn’t the Oscars and there simply wasn’t the budget, desire or time to plan the content side in advance. Instead we decided that a roving handheld camera with a professional presenter to explain everything would make the most sense. We enlisted the help of Nigel Barden, BBC Food and Drinks presenter (pictured at top), and he agreed to host the webcast.

A two hour live broadcast feels like five hours when you’re doing it and is a lot of time to fill. We decided to add a second camera which would capture a static wide angle view of the seating area (aka ‘the webcam’) that we would switch to when needed, and this would take the pressure off shooting solidly on a handheld camera for two hours. This way we could switch to the ‘webcam’ if we ever got weary, or the presenter or camera person or circumstances ran out of creative steam. We didn’t expect people to watch for the whole two hours but dip in and out over time.

With so many stakeholders and partners involved in the event (suppliers, bloggers, restaurant reviewers, journalists, twitterers), and several partners wanting to stream the event on their own websites, we needed a streaming solution that would allow for an embeddable player on 3rd party sites, be free or low cost, and fast.

A homegrown solution was possible but this would have meant taking developers off other important WorldTV work. Several live streaming services were considered (Mogulus, Justin.tv, Ustream.tv), but in the end we chose Ustream because we know it to be reliable, feature rich and easy-to-use. The staff also run a tight ship and are quick and efficient in responding - a key factor when organizing something at short notice. Ustream’s ability to get involved with the promotion of the event through editorial coverage was an added factor and the event ended up being promoted prominently on the Ustream homepage (pictured left).

We ran tests of the embedded player and the more advanced features of Ustream’s broadcast console - their browser based web application for uplinking live video.

We set up a page at worldtv.com/live where we embedded the Ustream player allowing us to go live to that page at any time. Simultaneously we sent the embed code to partner websites so they could start running their own tests. Finally we tested the broadcast console with a variety of different video sources connected to our uplink computer - an Apple MacPro tower.

A common problem for people doing live video is how to get video into their computer. Readers of our Founder’s blog will know he likes the Blackmagic Intensity HDMI card ($249) which slots into Windows or Mac computers and lets you pull in uncompressed, high definition video from any consumer video camera with an HDMI connection. Ustream’s broadcast console is able to access this video source and uplink it for broadcast.

Another option we tested was the excellent Canopus ADVC-55 analog-to-digital video converter box ($150). This plugs into a firewire port on your computer and allows you to connect any analogue video source using an S-Video or Composite (RCA/phono) connection.

Both options worked well with Ustream in testing and the decision for which one to use was ultimately determined by the camera setup. In actual fact, we ended up using both as we’ll explain.

Incidentally the Canopus box smokes any ‘TV / Video input device’ you might find at a big box computer store in terms of quality. If you’re thinking of getting an external video capture or input device and are considering the likes of Hauppage, Pinnacle, Diamond etc take a very close look at the Canopus products. They are made by the same people who make top end professional broadcast equipment (Grass Valley) and the quality shows through. If you have HDMI or Component video sources look no further than Blackmagic. They too make high end professional broadcast equipment and you get the benefit of all that R&D and systemic commitment to quality.

Knowing that we had two good options for getting video into our uplink computer we began planning the production side in more detail. Top of our planning list was audio…

Its a common misconception that the most important thing in a video production is video. In reality audio is more important because you can cover up bad visuals but nothing will fix bad sound. There’s actually no excuse for bad audio because professional grade microphones start at $110.

A handheld reporters mike was the clear choice and the specific mike we like at WorldTV is a BeyerDynamic M58 ($250 - pictured above) which has excellent shock absorbing features to reduce handling noise. Its long handle is particularly suited for settings where you need to ‘reach’ out to someone in a studio audience, or… across a restaurant table.

We needed a second mike to pick up atmosphere noise and to be ‘the mike that went along with the webcam’. We rented-in an AKG rifle mike for this and mounted it on a stand aimed at the diners.

Both microphones were fed into an audio mixer and from there into the computer. We kept the audio separate from the video to keep things more flexible. The Ustream broadcast console allows you to specify a separate audio and video source for uplinking.

A wireless microphone kit was used to adapt the handheld mike into a radio mike. We used two receivers - one ‘desktop’ style receiver (which went into the audio mixer) and a ‘beltpack’ receiver for the main handheld camera. The beltpack receiver was clipped onto the side of the camera (pictured right) and was there to allow the camera footage to be recorded in high quality onto the camera itself - with sound intact.

The camera we used was a Sony SR1 high definition camcorder. A Beachtek box was mounted to the underside of the camera to take audio from the beltpack receiver and feed into the camera. A LitePanel Micro was mounted on top of the camera as shown. This is an LED based light.

With the ‘acquisition’ gear worked out there were two challenges remaining. How to switch between the two cameras and how to light everything.

We considered two approaches to the switching. The first was a ‘hardware’ based vision mixer which would sit between the two cameras and the computer.  The second was a software based solution where both cameras feed into the computer and are then mixed in software.

We opted for the software option and did all the switching for the event using the excellent and free CamTwist for Mac. This is the same software that Chris Pirillo uses for his 24/7 live broadcast and while it’s not the most user friendly software written, it is extremely feature rich and lets you add text, graphics and all kinds of interesting effects. We used it to switch between the two cameras and add a WorldTV logo in the corner.

We ran our Sony handheld camera into the computer via a long HDMI cable. The ‘webcam’ was an SD Canon camcorder and was fed into the Canopus box via a composite video cable. At the last minute we added a 3rd ‘waitercam’ which was a tiny Swann wireless ’spycam’ whose receiver was fed into the Canopus box via a hardware switch (an RCA switcher). We were able to switch back and forth between the ‘webcam’ and ‘waitercam’ using this switch, providing we didn’t do it while either camera was actually live. A physical switch is not suitable for genuinely live switching.

Regarding the lighting for the event we had a major challenge. The dining area was surrounded on three sides by windows on what turned out to be an extremely sunny day and with the sun coming straight at us. Fortunately we rented a set of ‘Redheads’ (not an Irish female band) but 3 large professional film lights running at 800w each. We used all of them with ‘daylight’ gels to attempt to fill in light from the one side of the dining area that did not have windows. It’s never easy fighting the sun (!) but 2,400 watts and some blinds helps a little.

On the day we got down to the restaurant early. By 3pm everything was setup and everyone in place. Our Founder Alx who has worked in the past as a cameraman operated the main camera and did Directorial duties. Nigel Barden from the BBC as mentioned did the presenting.  Nick Tsinonis was on switching and Charlotte Chahrvin was on ‘waitercam’.

The event went amazingly smooth all things considered. A waiter did manage to trip a router cable which evaded being gaffa taped behind the bar, but that was about it. The broadcast was watched by hundreds of people around the world and the client was very happy.

We’re now planning to do more live events with a view to developing some live broadcasting features for our WorldTV users and which is the most often requested feature. We’ve got a wealth of real world experience to feed back into our development plans and some fascinating ideas that we’re working on. You will of course hear all about them right here.

If you would like us to webcast your upcoming event, drop us a line.

The event is an online stream of an exclusive Champagne and Oyster Tasting featuring some of London’s top food and drink personalities, all from the top floor of London’s famous Park Lane Hilton hotel. We are truly excited to be a part of it.

We will be capturing the event on three separate cameras to give the audience a unique insight into the proceedings and goings on. The restaurant itself is a truly legendary space with arguably the best view of London high above Hyde Park and with panoramic views from all sides.

A stellar selection of influential food, drink and lifestyle critics and bloggers are all attending and will be using social media applications like Twitter, Qik, live chat and so on to integrate their own audiences and followers. Guests will be presented with several exotic varieties of Oysters and Champagne from some of the finest houses including Galvin itself. Hosting the event for WorldTV is the BBC’s Food and Drink Expert Nigel Barden who will explain all the goings on to the audience following live around the world. Food and wine lovers will get a real treat and something of an education, and it can all be seen gratis at worldtv.com/live.

We are very excited to be producing such an original and innovative show as WorldTV’s first official live broadcast and we look forward to producing many, many more in future.

Don’t forget to tune in this Friday at 4pm UK time or 8am West Coast USA. Twitter users can follow @worldtv for a reminder and our founder @smashing who is producing the event. To follow all event activity use the search tag #galvinw.