We're launching a new partnership in New York which is going to infuse the show with a large number of new viewers, and also allow viewers an easy way to find short clips of each episode.

For example, being able to watch JUST the feature (kind of like the old "The Meat" feature, but more organized) rather than watching the full one hour when the full hour is just not an option.

Hopefully you'll all continue to watch the full show... and we'll continue to include some awesome stuff on the live show that is NOT going to make its way to the clip show.

Anyways, very excited about the growth of the show over the next few months. V3 launches on July 1st, and you'll be amazed at some of the other, untold secrets that will also be launching around the same time.

Category5 TV is stronger than ever in Season 5, and as we get closer and closer to our 5th anniversary show, you won't believe some of the magic!

Just curious what other viewers consider the best IRC clients to use for the Cat5 chat-room. The web based IRC client offered by Freenode (the one that the Cat5 website links to) certainly offers an easy way to get into the chat room, but the chat features are somewhat limited.

There are a lot of multi-protocol IM clients that support IRC, and a few IRC specific ones. I'm curious what others are using, and what are the key features that make your choice attractive to you. Pidgin is open source which makes it very attractive, but is Pidgin the hands down winner? or are there others with key features that Pidgin lacks?

I am not a heavy IM user so I don't stay current on the alternatives for IM clients. I'd appreciate the insights of other viewers.

Thanks

Well folks, V3 is coming together. It's not near completion, but it's getting closer to Phase 2.

While I am unsure of the specific date of the next phase of the Beta, I am please to announce that V3 will launch on July 1st!

Set the day aside if you're able, it'll be amazing to see how well it outperforms V2!

Looking forward to Phase 2 as well, since that will be when you on the beta team really step up to the plate and start giving me some hardcore feedback.

Robbie,
Did you implement the CDN for the forms as well? Because it seems like since the theme has changed the form's load a ton faster.

You guys have some catching up to do! Mwhahahaha!

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I created the importer to move all existing viewer accounts over to V3 without having to change passwords.

Just thought you'd be excited to know that.

Do we hold onto www. or drop it and become http://category5.tv (instead of http://www.category5.tv)?

What are you more apt to type or use?

The issue:
By removing the www. we have to start over in the search engines. I'll setup 301 redirects so it's not a HUGE big deal, but it could be pretty painful for a few months as the search engines find the new url.

Yeah, it's true. I super-compressed every episode, and now a full hour of the show is available in only 24 MB. [LATER CORRECTED: the filesize is closer to 50 MB per episode].

That means I could fit EVERY SINGLE EPISODE on a single 16GB flash drive and mail it to you.

The quality is crap (but useable), but it might be a cheap solution for those who don't have high-speed.

My cost on a 16GB flash stick is $25 plus shipping (it has our logo on it). Is this something worth pursuing? Is there anyone out there who would pay enough to cover the hardware, shipping & perhaps a little extra for the time to create it?

I'm really feeling like the social buttons were important on the show index page (Flattr, Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet, Google +1).

Do I paginate so it doesn't affect performance as much, or do I use a popup with a simple "Share" button on each episode?

I removed the image lazy loader from the Season 5 episode list page on V3. I felt the advantages of having a lazy loader (which I love) were outweight by the disadvantages (mainly, the user had to scroll once to see the first image, and we can't use some jquery plugins which allow category sorting).

Comments? I know this adds to the load size of the page pretty substantially, but because we're on a CDN, I think it'll still be super fast. How does it feel to you?