New Product Releases June 25th, 2012

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New Share Tab in the Ustream Broadcast Console

A few months ago, we launched a new version of the Ustream Broadcast Console, with a streamlined design, improved broadcasting quality and integrated Social Stream and chat.

We also introduced Ustream Remote, to allow all the same functionality to be available to broadcasters who don't broadcast from their browser, but instead broadcast from Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE) or other Ustream compatible encoding software / hardware.

Today, we added some new sharing functionality, to make it even easier to share your broadcast when you go live and get your friends and fans to come watch.

Share tab

The new Share Tab allows you to quickly and easily share your broadcast with your followers on Ustream, Facebook and Twitter.

Link your Ustream account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts under https://www.ustream.tv/account/connect...

Here's how it works:
When you open the Broadcast Console, or Ustream Remote, a countdown starts from 3:00 and shares your message when it reaches zero.

As a broadcaster, you have full control over this: you can let it send out the default message automatically, or you can compose a custom one. For either method of sharing, highlight the networks you want to send the message on and hit Share.



At the bottom of the console we also display your channel URL so you can copy and paste this to an email, a text message, or to post on other sites.

Email Notifications Dashboard page

We want to make sure as a broadcaster or a viewer you are able to keep up with what is happening on Ustream. However, we also understand that some people might want more or less emails from us. For example, if you have a very popular channel, it might not make sense to not get notified every time you get a new follower, but if you are just starting out, it might be exciting to know this. So we've added the ability for you to control exactly which notifications you receive from Ustream and how often you get them.

You can find this in your user dashboard at https://www.ustream.tv/account/notific...



The settings above show the actual defaults.
In the future, this might be the home for mobile push notifications as well.

New kinds of email notifications:

Viewer Notifications

If you take a look at the settings above, the first two rows you see under Viewer notifications are alerts we already had in place. Now you can control if and when you want to receive these.

In addition to that, we are introducing 3 new kinds of viewer alerts: new videos, new events and new channels from broadcasters you follow.

Broadcaster Notifications

We also added 3 new alerts for broadcasters: reminding you of your upcoming events (we've been reminding viewers for a long time but not the actual broadcasters) and notifying you when you get new followers on your channels or new RSVPs for your events.

Every notification email will also include two unsubscribe links:
A) unsubscribe from the specific type of notification you just received, or
B) disable all Ustream notifications

The immediate notifications are live now.

Email digests

In addition to being able to receive the above emails immediately, you can choose to receive them in the form of daily and weekly digests.

Here's some examples of what those look like.

The viewer digest


The broadcaster digest:


Each digest includes the types of notifications listed above.

The daily/weekly digests will be enabled tomorrow.