We released an important update to the website yesterday, which finally unifies the experience of free and premium channels into what we hope is a cleaner, more effective interface.

These changes make it more seamless to move between premium and free channels, and add tweets from our partners in place of the boring channel descriptions.

The Flash player implementation has also been sorted out so premium users do not see the Livestation logo, and it is easier for us to configure. We’ve also increased the streaming buffer size to help iron out the freezing problems some users have reported.

We also added a neat feature for the website, inspired by YouTube and DivX player, called ‘Dim the lights’. This is a nice little effect that reduces the brightness of the website user interface so you can concentrate on the video when watching for long durations. You can find it under all of the partner channels. We hope you like it!

In an unfortunate conjunction with these happy improvements, our content delivery network had a few hiccups yesterday, so we had a few hours where streams were very unreliable. This did not appear to be related to the web deployment. It seems to be more stable now and we wish the CDN the best of luck over the weekend in their debugging.