Telerik TV v2 beta now live!

As you know, video is increasingly becoming an important part of learning on the web, and at Telerik we’ve been embracing video for a while now. The current version of Telerik TV moves more than 2 terabytes of data every month and it continues to grow in popularity. It has served its purpose, but as we continue to add products and more videos, we recognized the need for a better portal.

The main goal for Phase One of Telerik TV v2 (or TTV2, as we call it) is to make it easier to find videos. In the current system, you have very limited options for finding videos, and often older videos are very difficult to locate. The system aims to resolve that by introducing multiple “paths” to a video so that people with all styles of browsing preference can find Telerik video content.

In the Phase One beta, you’ll find many new features, including:

• Multiple featured videos on the home page (presented with Telerik’s Silverlight CoverFlow)
• Video series (a collection of ordered, related videos)
• Video ratings (tell us if you love or hate a video)
• Video feedback (send us comments about a video)
• TweetMeme and Facebook Like support (FB like is disabled in Beta)
• Dedicated page for every Telerik product with helpful video resources (including “Getting Started” video series)
• Progressive Enhancement tooltips (hover over a video to see more details)
• Improved video search
• Browse videos by Category and Tag

TTV2 is built on ASP.NET MVC 2 using the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC and OpenAccess ORM for data access. And, yes, we are still using Flash for video delivery, but that is changing in Phase Two (more on that in a moment).

Check-out the live Beta of Telerik TV 2 now and let us know what you think!

What’s Next

We don’t plan a long beta for TTV2. In fact, we are primarily running this beta to make sure there are no major issues and to make sure all configuration of the new site is complete (we already know a few areas need some more attention). If everything looks good, we’ll be taking TTV2 to production as early as next week.

Phase Two
After Phase One ships, we’ll be working quickly to prepare Phase Two. Some of the things we hope to achieve in Phase Two with TTV2 are:

• Silverlight-based media encoding and delivery (with uncompromised delivery performance)
• With the possible addition of HTML5 video playback to enable TTV viewing on iPads and iPhones
• Chapters in videos
• Enhanced video analytics (so we know more about how you’re using videos, and then make them better)

Post-Phase Two
We also recognize that the future is not just video. It’s multimedia- or “transmedia” as it’s now being termed. So as we look past Phase Two and in to Phase Three for TTV2, we will be delivering innovative web-based experiences that blend code snippets and text, synchronized with video, in an immersive online learning experience. Similar to the innovation already found in our Telerik Trainer, but made more accessible through the web. Our goal is to provide the best web-based learning experience available for software products.

For now, enjoy the beta and send us your feedback. We hope that these changes help make your lives as developers even easier.