There’s been a lot of change in Livestation over the last few months. I’d like to explain where that came from, and a little of what you can expect in the future.

In the beginning

Many months ago now, at the Livestation engineering den (the Bakery),
we looked at whether Livestation was something we used on a daily basis. The answer was clear, not enough of us were using it. If we weren’t using it, then why should anyone else?

Insight

About the same time I remembered this great blog, Creating Passionate Users and in particular this great post. We needed more of the woman’s reaction, not the man’s.

Since that time our new goal been to create an application that we use on a daily basis. It sounds so simple but it really is easy to get carried away with building technology and forgetting that solutions don’t mean anything if people are not using them.

Ringing the changes

Many of the changes in recents months have been created and added because of this new philosophy: User added streams, channel alerts and What’s Hot are just some of these new features. User added streams was a total paradigm shift for the whole product and without “What’s Hot” we would never have discovered the great films on Thriller TV USA or been able to use the Amazon River Fishes as our screensaver.

Loads more to come.

So, based on this new philosophy, what are plans for the future? I’ll do a proper “roadmap” post soon, but for now, highlights for me are:

- the Live Spider – we’re checking the User added channels to make sure they work, and avoid dead channels. The screen grabs are pretty good to see what the content is on the channel, old school, singing, rockets! (Good for usability, but still not that cool).

- Multi-screen – :) Watch 2,3,4 channels at the same time. The player already does this if you know the right tricks… but it’s not ready for release yet. (Ok, this is cooler)

Multiscreen in development:

Last, but not least

- Mobile Livestation… We’re quite close to getting Livestation on a certain highly popular, aesthetically pleasing, normally black, not made by Microsoft or Google handset… (now this is totally f£$king cool: ).

Jari