We are continually working to improve the Mogulus website. We did a release this week which features the addition of a new support forum. We hope you will help us grow this into a repository of useful information for producers. The forum can be found at http://www.mogulus.com/forum

In addition to offering an outlet for increased discussion between producers, Mogulus Producer Support and the full Mogulus team will be answering your questions.

As always you can continue to  contact support directly for technical issues, find answers to the most commonly asked questions in our FAQ and get detailed instructions on all aspects of using Mogulus Studio in our Userguide. See you in the Forum!

As announced, we have launched this afternoon the Google Overlay ads on Mogulus Free channels.
Thanks to all the Mogulus producers who decided to keep the adverts on.
Over the next few weeks we will be analyzing the results very closely.

We have big news: starting Thursday 29th May 2008 at 3pm EST, we will begin inserting overlay adverts in all Mogulus Free channels.

The adverts are provided by our partner Google and are content and viewer location targeted text adverts. They will be shown on the Mogulus channel page and all embedded Mogulus players (for Mogulus Free channels only).

To see the adverts in action visit “The Digital Lifestyle”.
http://www.mogulus.com/tdl
http://www.thedigitallifestyle.tv

Above : Snapshot of Apple News channel “The Digital Lifestyle” showing a New York and Apple targeted overlay text advert “NYC Mac Support”.

While at the moment, Mogulus Pro is not yet available for purchase online with a credit card (we will offer this during this summer), we have decided to offer a free opt-out option allowing any producer to disable the adverts on their channel. You can turn them off now from within your Mogulus studio before we activate the adverts on Friday.

Click here to follow the step by step instructions on how to manage your advertising options.

We hope you will agree that the ads are not too intrusive and, particularly in this first phase, we sincerely hope that you will leave them enabled. Advertising on Mogulus Free channels will help us to offset some of the high hosting bandwidth costs we are incurring every month and allow us to keep the free platform exactly that… free! We’ll also be evaluating just how effective the ads are and this will help us plan a future release of advertising revenue share programs for selected Mogulus producers.

Good news – we have released an update to our encoding system which is used when you upload videos into your Mogulus studio – here are the changes:

1) Aspect Ratio – You can now upload 16/9 and other aspect ratios video. We will letterbox it automatically instead of resizing to 4/3 aspect ratio. Mogulus Pro will allow you in the future to set your channel to other aspect ratios than 4/3.

2) Audio Normalization – We now normalize the audio of every video clip you upload. This process adjust the audio volume of all your uploaded videos so that they all have the same perceived volume when playing in the auto-pilot.

3) Quality upgrade – while we did not increase the bit rate or change the codec, you should see a minor video quality increase when uploading new videos.

If you have any feedback or comment send us an email!

We are proud to announce the latest, very requested, Mogulus feature: video on-demand. This feature gives the ability for Mogulus producers to provide their viewers with a fully customizable, real-time, on-demand library of videos and recordings.

Any change you make to your channel’s on-demand library is reflected immediately in the player widget. This means you can add clips or recordings immediately after having finished a broadcast, and all the viewers will have access to it.

Here is how to use this new feature:

To enable video on demand, login to the studio and click on the “Video On-demand” tab.

1. First, turn on the “Video on Demand” button.

2. Then, drag any storyboard from your library into the on-demand library. You can also create folders to organize your content.

3. If you want your storyboard to appear to the viewers as a single clip, check the “play as one” checkbox.

From the viewer’s perspective, the experience is seamless, fully integrated. The new on-demand button in the player widget brings an iPod style menu to browse the library.

Once you select a video, you can pause/play and seek to any desired area in the video.

Click “On-Air” to go back to the linear TV / live broadcast at anytime.

Tip: You can also get a player widget with the on-demand library showing all the time (without having to click on it). Just go to your Studio, to the “Get Player Widget” tab, and grab the preset with “everything” showing the vod library.

In addition, the latest release includes:

- In the Studio: ability to download any individual clips within a storyboard directly to your computer, and ability to edit the title of each video and storyboard, and add a description to it.

- Hardware accelerated full screen mode.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our community for its immensely valuable feedback! We hope you will enjoy this new feature.

Last Thursday we performed a major upgrade of the Mogulus studio and player. Here are the changes:

Import from Video Podcast : You can now take any Video Podcast URL and list the contents of the podcast to import its clips into a storyboard. This feature makes it very easy for producers with existing podcasts to synchronize their Mogulus channel with their latest content.

Import from Web Server : If you already have video files on a web server, you can avoid re-uploading them on Mogulus by using this feature. Simply enter the file URL and choose the storyboard and the Mogulus servers will import it for you.

1GB Video Uploads : We’re now done with the testing phase of this feature and are releasing it to all our producers. You can now upload video files of up to 1GB!

Highly customizable Player Widget: Previously, producers could only customize a few aspect of the player widget look and feel. You can now make your Mogulus player truly unique by customizing almost every aspect of it. For example, you can put the chat underneath or on the side of the video window. Check it out in the Get Player Tab in the studio.

Video Help – Press the Help button in the studio and you now have access to a video tutorial for each section, making it easier to learn how to use the Mogulus studio.

Auto-pilot control from broadcast live: This is a small usability improvement which should be very useful. At the end of your show, you can now resume or restart your autopilot from the broadcast live tab instead of having to switch to the Auto-pilot tab.

Other various bug fixes and performance enhancements : Too many to list, but this release include improvements with the scalability and stability of the service.

Feel free to send us feedback on your experience with the new features!

On Monday we performed a major upgrade to the Mogulus network, player and studio (Beta 1.3.18). Here are some of the changes which will affect producers and viewers :

- Flash Media Encoder and On2 Flix Live integration: for more details check this fully detailed post : Stream live on Mogulus using Flash Media Encoder or ON2 Flix Live

- Smooth camera switching: when switching from one camera to another, the stream used to freeze for a few second. This has been fixed, and you will now experience a smooth cross fade when switching cameras.

- Camera source: You can now select the camera source directly from the camera panel instead of having to go to the “Adobe Flash Player Settings” panel to make a change. You can also make the switch while you are live if you have multiple video input on your local pc. For example, if you use a screen capture software (such as WebcamMax or Camtwist), you can switch back and forth your desktop camera and webcam without switching the camera in the studio (allowing you to keep a seamless audio commentary).

- Remote camera and audio source selection: Camera and audio sources can now be changed remotely when you use multiple studios to produce a show.

- Storyboard total time: You can now see the total length of a story board.

- Account creation: Email verification is no longer mandatory when you create a new account.

- Banner removal: We added a button to remove the banner you uploaded on your channel page – in case you need to.

- Scalability: Major server upgrade to allow your channel and the Mogulus network to support more concurrent viewers.

- Chat: Improvements to the chat room performance and to malicious behavior handling.

- Auto Pilot: We have reduced the delay to resume the autopilot to a few seconds when you press ‘Restart/Resume auto pilot’, stop your Qik stream or close your studio.

- Qik integration: Our beta integration with Qik had issues when used in low signal networks. The stream would work on Qik.com but would drop from Mogulus.com. This has now been resolved and the integration is more reliable. Also, you will now see a confirmation message on the phone when you are live on your Mogulus channel, along with the current number of viewers. Finally, all the streams you send to your Mogulus channel via your Qik.com enabled phone are now automatically recorded and added to your library.

Since the Mogulus launch in November, you might have noticed the new player on the channel page with embedded chat – this player is now the Mogulus Player widget, customizable and available for embedding on any website.

The previous player will continue to be supported but new embed codes will not be issued, we recommend that producers switch when convenient to the new player on their website.

You can grab the code to embed the new player either from the Mogulus Grid, the new player or the Mogulus Studio.

In the Mogulus Grid or on any new player, press the menu button and then the “Embed this Channel” option. You will be able to choose from a range of options before you press the Copy button to grab the tag.

In the studio, you can pick it from the “Get Player” Tab.

New Player features :
- Updated design.

- Full screen option.

- Channel chat.

- Realtime Live Indicator to indicate to your audience when you channel is on autopilot (“On-Air”) or when it is actually live (“On-Air Live”).

- Optimized performance and size.

- Embed this channel option (Menu).

New Player Options :
- Customizable background and chrome colors.
- Select the initial volume of the player (so that you can for example mute it automatically when it starts on a webpage).
- Show or hide the viewer count.
- Enable channel chat.
- Turn on by default.
- Size.

And lastly, the Mogulus Grid is also available for embedding on any website. To pick the code just choose the “Embed this Grid” option on the Mogulus Grid.

We are pleased to announce that we have release a new version of the Mogulus studio with many small improvements.

- You can now list your all your channels at the touch of a button, right on the Studio login screen.

- New camera quality setting. In the camera settings you will see 4 options for image quality instead of the previous 3. Try option 3 – it is not the default but we recommend to try it for better video quality when streaming live, if you have the bandwidth.

- Video Search now has paging, providing the ability to browse through more than 50 results.

- Events in the Setting>>My Channel page option has been restructured to be actual dates. This will allow us to create a schedule on the website, for viewers to easily find new events.

- Re-aranging clips in a storyboard (dragging around, re-ordering) has been optimized and bugs have been fixed.

- The new Mogulus player and options have been integrated in the “Get Player” tab, to allow you to easily get the embed tag for the new player right from your Studio.

- The studio now shows the “Broadcast Live” tab by default when logging in.