#inside chew

Back in August last year, we launched what we called Chew2.0 - a reworking of the Chew homepage experience (which was followed by new Channel and Watch pages). 

Over the last few months, we've been improving the Chew2.0 concept with a focus on data-driven curation. Using our audience analytics from the last year or so, we've zoned in on what content consumers want when they come to Chew. We've used these learnings to rebuild the site - making it easier to discover more of the content you love from across the Chew platform. 

Today, we've launched the first step towards this new vision for Chew. You'll see a more focused homepage; one that displays more sets, DJs, genres and crews on Chew. The new homepage also features all-new Popular, Live and Latest pages - where you can find the most popular shows on the platform, all shows that are live right now and the latest archived content across all genres on Chew. 

Not too far in the future, this new look and feel will be rolled out across the platform; updating the Explore, Channel and Watch pages. We'll also be adding a bit more intelligence behind the scenes, so your Chew experience will start becoming unique to you and your tastes - but that's for a future Inside Chew Tech update. 

It’s been an eventful fortnight since we shared the last Inside Chew Tech roundup — with a few fairly significant releases to the Chew platform.

Read on for a quick run-through of everything we’ve pushed over the last two weeks…

Stats for Kryder and Tom Staar’s Cartel show during Miami Music Week 2016

Stats

The biggest feature release from the past fortnight is the arrival of Stats for our creators. As a broadcaster, you now have access to channel-level stats(that display engagement on your content over the last 30 days) alongside show-specific stats (as demonstrated by the screenshot above). To find your show-specific stats, go to the show’s Watch page and find the Stats tab.

We’ve also released play counts on every piece of Chew content — which you can find beside the broadcast timestamp and chat messages counter.

Chew chat moderation tools for creators

Chat management and moderation

This has been cropping up in our user discussions over the last few weeks — hopefully, it’s not a feature used too frequently as the Chew community scales but always useful to have! Our creators can now assign moderator status to other Chew users and ban other users (a ban prevents that user from posting in that chat).

By clicking ‘Manage All’, creators and any user in Chew chat can now search and add users to chat, even if the user isn’t in that particular chat.

Contribute to the Chew guide on Github

The new and improved guide

We wrote the Chew guide in the run-up to launching the platform early last year. While it served its purpose in the early days, we felt it could do with revisiting. Over the last few weeks, we’ve simplified parts and rewritten others — and will be continuing to improve the guide in the coming few months. There’s still work to be done (tutorial videos, anyone?!) and, if you’d like to contribute, you can do so on Github.

Stream forwarding

In the run-up to our first-ever digital festival (the archives for the Chew block party are in the crew), a number of our DJs had requested we add a stream forwarding feature to the platform.

Crew DJs can now forward their audiences onto other shows, and we’ll be rolling this out across Chew in the future. To find out more about the forwarding, check the guide.

Other notable updates

Alongside new features, we release improvements and bug fixes to Chew every week or so. Other than the updates described above, we’ve added the ability to hide your account’s activity tab and Chew now has its own SSL certificate!

Inside Chew Tech #24 - Yes, Even More Updates!

As you may have guessed from the title, we’ve got another round of small but meaningful improvements in this week’s Inside Chew Tech recap. Here’s the latest platform news from the last week or so:

Player Waveform

It’s a small visual update (for now), but you can now see a waveform representing an archived show’s audio feed in the player scrubber (as demonstrated in the Basstrace screenshot above). This highlights where the show’s audio starts, interesting points in the mix and more - and will develop into much more with future updates. Watch this space!

Email Preferences

This one’s an update we know a few of you have been waiting on. You can now update your email preferences (opt in or out of all Chew emails) from the your Account settings.

Custom Thumbnails

You may have noticed we take live screenshots of your broadcasts on Chew for thumbnails or share images - well, you can now use these screenshots to set custom thumbnails for your archives. This isn’t a legacy update, so only shows broadcast or uploaded after yesterday (29/06/16) will have this feature. 

Followers/ Following

If you navigate to your profile (here’s Chew’s, for example), and click on either ‘Followers’ or ‘Following’, you can now see a complete list of the accounts you follow or those that follow you. You can also add /followers or /following to your profile URL to see the same lists. Enjoy!

Inside Chew Tech #23 - More Updates!

It’s another small round of updates in this week’s Inside Chew Tech recap. Here’s what we’ve been working on over the last week (alongside some behind-the-scenes stuff we can’t tell you about yet!):

We’ve added granularity to your embed options (as you can see in the RTS.FM screenshot above). This means you can now enable/ disable both autoplay and mute, add chat and even have a chat-specific embed. There’s more to come with embed improvements (we know you guys have a few more you’d like to see). 

We’ve updated your show titles, so you can now set URLs and titles separately. This one’s a small but important improvement we know a lot of you have been asking for! URLs will still default to your show title, but you’re now able to edit either without updating the other. 

It’s taken a while to roll out, but we’ve updated email preferences available to Chew users and our audience. We’ve heard you loud and clear that there needs to be some ability to edit frequency, preferences and so on - so now you can! 

Last but definitely not least, we’ve added the @reply autocomplete function to Chew chat for our smartphone users. Like your desktop experience, we’ll now autocomplete any @replies when contributing to Chew chat on smartphones and tablets! 

This week’s Inside Chew Tech update to Chew sees a few incremental improvements across chat, the new and improved player and more. Read on to find out what we’ve been up to! 

Oudjat demoing our chat updates!

We’ve rolled out a few chat updates this week. First, you can now run Chew chat in a pop out window separate to the player. Soon, you’ll also be able to run chat in its own embed code too! You can now follow users in chat with the new hovercards (simply hover over a user’s name to follow them). Lastly, we’ve started work on the chat mod tools some of you guys have been requesting. More news on that soon! 

Things don’t always go to plan with live or archived streams - so for when things go wrong, we’ve updated the error messages you’ll see to give you more info on what could be going wrong (so if something’s not working quite right, you should be able to see what’s up!)

You can now stream to any of our regional servers (rather than being limited to your nearest one). We’ve got more updates here coming which should improve your broadcast experience on Chew!

For anyone who’s checked out the brand new Chew API, you can now set a from/to date range when searching for shows. Again, more updates coming to the API! In the meantime, check it here.  

Iside Chew Tech #21 - Introducing our API

Calling all developers!

A lot of you have been asking for it. Today we're rolling out the Chew API!

In our most recent Inside Chew Tech post, we hinted at the arrival of one of the biggest new features we’ve released in ages.

You guys have started experimenting with Chew crews already, but we figured it was time to introduce them. 

What are Chew crews you ask? Well, they’re our take on groups, playlists and much, much more. 

The SUB FM tag on Chew

Over the last few months, we’ve noticed Chew users collaborating on individual accounts. SUB FM are a great example. The SUB FM team have the main Chew account, but a lot of the station’s DJs also have their own individual accounts. 

With Chew crews, SUB FM could have a SUB FM crew that allows all the station’s DJs to broadcast to a central place (it would effectively be a SUB FM group) from their own accounts. 

You can see an example of the Chew Staff Crew here:

The Chew staff crew

Crews can be open (i.e. anyone can join) or closed (i.e. users have to request permission to join). You can follow the crew as you would an individual DJ on Chew - and get the normal notifications (e.g. when they Go Live). Crew members’ Shows will display in the crew’s archive - and you can find individual members to follow in the members list.

Check the ‘Chew Staff Crew’ tag in the tag field 

There’s a lot of functionality still to come from Chew Crews, but for now the Go Live process is the same as it’s always been. You’ll notice there’s a special crew tag in the Chew Crew screenshot above - but we’ll explain what these are in a future Inside Chew Tech post.

Chew crews the Chew account is a member of 

We’ll be featuring our favourite crews on the homepage - so why not create your first crew today! We can’t wait to see how you guys use the crews feature in the coming weeks. 

One of the things we've kept getting asked over the last two weeks - especially as our users get to grips with the Chew platform - is the ability to hide test/ demo shows.

As of today, from your Run page, Shows page and Channel page you have the ability to set individual Shows as public or private via the button highlighted above.

And this feature even works with archived content!