Hump Day: video streaming coming soon

[Jordan Miller]

 

Happy Hump Day, team!

Last week, I shared a preview of some of the live community updates we're releasing. Our own community is already integrated with some of them, including who's typing a response, who's viewing a topic and sentiment analysis. Read more about them here:

 

There's another new feature that I want to touch on: video streaming.

Pretty soon, we'll be offering the ability to upload and then stream video content straight to your Invision Community-powered community. This is a great opportunity to offer video content directly onto your community and dissuade members from leaving to check things out on other streaming platforms like YouTube. 

Speaking of YouTube, have you seen my interview with Invision's founders? 😆  One day soon we'll be able to share these video interviews right here!
 

 

There's going to be some exciting implementations to spark community engagement regarding these video streams, but more on that to come  🙃 🙃 🙃.

Feel free to leave any guesses in the comments. 

 

While I've got you, here's a roundup of updates/fixes made to the platform by our talented dev team. Nicely done!

Quote

- Fixed an issue where widgets may not be available even with enabled apps.
- Added a solved/unsolved filter for activity streams.
- Fixed an issue where status updates where appearing as search results even if the user had no permissions to view profiles.
- Improved the fluid-mode per forum filters to remove a page reload, and to reverse the filter checkbox status to make it clear which are being viewed.
- Fixed an issue where managing MFA in the Account Settings would result in an IN_DEV CSRF key warning.
- Fixed some issues with the online status indicator in account settings.

Excited to expand even more on the live community features, plus video streaming, in the near future.

It's worth mentioning this video streaming will be available on select standard plans. However, self-hosters, fear not! We have a really cool new feature for you dropping in June that I will touch on very soon. Here's a hint: heads up!

Thoughts? Drop us a line in the comments and join the conversation; I'd love to chat with ya.

[AlexWebsites]

6 hours ago, Jordan Miller said:

It's worth mentioning this video streaming will be available on select standard plans. However, self-hosters, fear not! We have a really cool new feature for you dropping in June that I will touch on very soon. Here's a hint: heads up!

Video streaming sounds great, although I'm self-hosted so I will wait to get excited. I would settle for 3rd party video conversion/streaming from cloudflare 😎

[jesuralem]

4 hours ago, AlexWebsites said:

although I'm self-hosted so I will wait to get excited.

Seriously, what is the point of announcign this feature on this public community when it will be only available to " corporate and enterprise" cloud plan ? How many clients does IPS have on this plan ? what %age of this community members does this represent ?

Announcing features only available to a few % of your clients can only frustrate the vast majority.

[Matt]

2 hours ago, jesuralem said:

Seriously, what is the point of announcign this feature on this public community when it will be only available to " corporate and enterprise" cloud plan ? How many clients does IPS have on this plan ? what %age of this community members does this represent ?

Announcing features only available to a few % of your clients can only frustrate the vast majority.

We are fortunate to work with some of the worlds biggest brands, such as LEGO, Squarespace, SEGA, Mattel, etc. Working closely with the community managers from these brands allows us to really understand the tools needed to manage and moderate at scale. A lot of the features that have been added over the past few years to all platforms have been driven by these conversations in addition to feedback left on our community.

As a company that creates a community platform that can be used from the smallest of new communities to managing thousands of posts a day, there will be some features that we announce that will not be of interest to you.

It's absolutely fine to skip past these announcements.

We are not going to stop talking to all of our customers when announcing new features.

[Sonya*]

11 minutes ago, Matt said:

such as LEGO, Squarespace, SEGA, Mattel, etc.

I cannot find a SEGA community, only the old reddit post, that the forums have been shut down back in 2019. 

 

[opentype]

We can only skip the news, if it is indicated to whom it applies. 

Scenario A:

• “Streaming is coming (to enterprise plans)”
• I am not not on that plan, so moving on.

Otherwise it will be scenario B:

• “Streaming is coming!”
• Getting exiting.
• Having to research the details.
• Finding out to whom it applies.
• Being frustrated. 

So, it’s very much about how the news are presented. 

[Dreadknux]

As it happens, I'm quite interested in this feature. My community admins are looking to use Twitch/YouTube streaming and it would be handy to have that pushed to our community directly so they don't have to go off-site to view it. I know ultimately that, with this specific update, I could just use my own coded solution to embed a livestream video onto my community homepage or something, but that's not really the point. It's just nice that there's a baked-in solution that's being worked on.

So it's not that I'm not interested in this feature.

It's the fact that it's locked to specific customers - in this case, those only on subscription/enterprise plans.

This has been happening a lot lately. But while the 'live view' stuff could be explained away by using AI/server-side tech, I'm wondering what it is about this particular feature that is keeping it locked to hosted plans only at this time?

I understand if you want to put a priority towards those who are paying you hosting $$$, so that they get these cool new features like, a few months ahead of self-hosted customers. You might want to road-test/beta-test them in the field, or whatever. But it would be nice if self-hosted customers could get these features as well. Some transparency on that would be appreciated.

It's also great that you're having lots of conversations with the larger-brand customers, and I'm sure their feedback is being responded to in a very speedy fashion (as it should be). It would be nice if IPS could also afford to at least acknowledge some of the suggestions made on your own forums (even if such suggestions are not in the current pipeline, just an acknowledgement that it's something they will or won't do). LEGO might think they're being listened to, but as a customer of nearly 20 years I'm not feeling it quite as much.

Edited May 12, 2022 by Dreadknux

[Matt]

1 hour ago, Sonya* said:

I cannot find a SEGA community, only the old reddit post, that the forums have been shut down back in 2019. 

 

https://community.sigames.com/forums/

SI Games are a London games publisher for SEGA best known for Football Manager.

52 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

I'm wondering what it is about this particular feature that is keeping it locked to hosted plans only at this time?

We're leveraging AWS S3 bucket transcoding using a custom set up developed by an AWS vendor. The costs associated with transcoding video into a streamable format isn't something we can bring to the other plans.

[Matt]

55 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

but as a customer of nearly 20 years I'm not feeling it quite as much.

These are good suggestions but most of them require a good amount of framework refactoring to make them  possible. Also none of those topics had any traction from a single other Invision Community owner voicing that they wanted the same thing. 

1 hour ago, opentype said:

So, it’s very much about how the news are presented. 

Fair point and noted, thanks 🙂 

[Dreadknux]

6 minutes ago, Matt said:

These are good suggestions but most of them require a good amount of framework refactoring to make them  possible. Also none of those topics had any traction from a single other Invision Community owner voicing that they wanted the same thing. 

Thanks for the feedback - I get what you're saying about no follow-up comments on those topics but they did get a fair number of positive reactions from other Invision Community clients (the Pages one received 7) so I think that counts for something? I don't think these are ideas that would only benefit me, but I understand that you would probably like to see lots of activity in a topic before wanting to comment on it. Fair enough.

[Bethanyrayne]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

Quote

We are fortunate to work with some of the worlds biggest brands, such as LEGO, Squarespace, SEGA, Mattel, etc. Working closely with the community managers from these brands allows us to really understand the tools needed to manage and moderate at scale.

Quote

We are not going to stop talking to all of our customers when announcing new features.

Are you asking us to believe that you communicate with the "worlds biggest brands, such as LEGO, Squarespace, SEGA, Mattel" through the medium of this forum? That's not the case is it because they will have their own account managers.

[AlexWebsites]

16 hours ago, Jordan Miller said:

There's another new feature that I want to touch on: video streaming.

Is this really for cloud enterprise customers only? How many of them are in these forums? Maybe you should put a halo or some sort of identifier around their profile pics…they seem to be the gold standard around here..lol! 
 

12 minutes ago, Matt said:

We're leveraging AWS S3 bucket transcoding using a custom set up developed by an AWS vendor. The costs associated with transcoding video into a streamable format isn't something we can bring to the other plans.

Anyone can use AWS, it isn’t restricted to large users. Why can’t that vendor offer a plug-in/app? 

[Matt]

8 minutes ago, AlexWebsites said:

How many of them are in these forums?

A good number of their community managers and team read these forums and follow our blog. They tell us this a lot. 🙂

 

Quote

Anyone can use AWS, it isn’t restricted to large users. Why can’t that vendor offer a plug-in/app? 

As mentioned before, it's not that simple. The architecture we have isn't open and to bring transcoding to all platforms isn't as simple as saying "and now plugin your endpoint here". AWS doesn't have a service where it accepts uploads, puts them in a queue, visually displays processing in progress, processes the queue, transcode it into multiple formats including streaming, move it back into the community's bucket, update the queue system to tell the UI to remove the processing information and start streaming the video.

All that is proprietary code we've developed for our cloud platform.

[Matt]

22 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

Thanks for the feedback - I get what you're saying about no follow-up comments on those topics but they did get a fair number of positive reactions from other Invision Community clients (the Pages one received 7) so I think that counts for something? I don't think these are ideas that would only benefit me, but I understand that you would probably like to see lots of activity in a topic before wanting to comment on it. Fair enough.

I really liked the Pages suggestion honestly. It's just that it's a complex area of code that we have earmarked to refactor at some point, so it's not something we'd consider before then.

[Sonya*]

9 minutes ago, Matt said:

I really liked the Pages suggestion honestly. It's just that it's a complex area of code that we have earmarked to refactor at some point, so it's not something we'd consider before then.

@Matt, is there any particular reason, that Pages databases are not included in the Creator plan? Is that due your new infrastructure? 

 

[jesuralem]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

We are fortunate to work with some of the worlds biggest brands, such as LEGO, Squarespace, SEGA, Mattel, etc. Working closely with the community managers from these brands allows us to really understand the tools needed to manage and moderate at scale.

Given you have a privileged relationship with their CM, there is indeed no use to announce here features that are specific to them. I don't deny that we are all lucky that they are using IPS and probably bring a lot of ideas benefiting to every community. Just in these cases public annoucement are probably useless.

 

44 minutes ago, Matt said:

The costs associated with transcoding video into a streamable format isn't something we can bring to the other plans.

This is totally understable and i have no issue with it. But you can't just present it as a new feature without at least mentionnign clearly that it won't be available to most.

[Matt]

27 minutes ago, jesuralem said:

But you can't just present it as a new feature without at least mentionnign clearly that it won't be available to most.

This is fair feedback, thank you.

We can do better at how we present the news of new features to make it clear which platform and level it is for. I understand how this can cause friction and I should have been more aware of that.

[Dreadknux]

17 hours ago, Jordan Miller said:

However, self-hosters, fear not! We have a really cool new feature for you dropping in June that I will touch on very soon. Here's a hint: heads up!

So… what do we think this will be? The clue is pretty cryptic. New user profile features? Photo recognition stuff? Dynamic floating heads appearing on the front end? 😛

Looking forward to hearing more about it!

[Jordan Miller]

2 hours ago, Bethanyrayne said:

Are you asking us to believe that you communicate with the "worlds biggest brands, such as LEGO, Squarespace, SEGA, Mattel" through the medium of this forum? That's not the case is it because they will have their own account managers.

I feel you. To be honest, yes, many of our clients, both big and small, tell us they frequent our forums (including this section) - even if they aren't actively posting. The alternative is to not mention these features at all? 

[AlexWebsites]

22 minutes ago, Jordan Miller said:

I feel you. To be honest, yes, many of our clients, both big and small, tell us they frequent our forums (including this section) - even if they aren't actively posting. The alternative is to not mention these features at all? 

Since video streaming is an enterprise option only, I would say it does not apply to the majority on these forums. I would not have posted this, it only points out what the majority will not get. Especially with a title like "video streaming coming soon"...click bait!

Edited May 12, 2022 by AlexWebsites

[Davyc]

21 minutes ago, Jordan Miller said:

The alternative is to not mention these features at all? 

No!  If you don't mention new features then no one will know about them but, as @opentype mentioned in an earlier post it may be prudent to mention in the topic title who the new features are aimed at so as to avoid ambiguity and to maintain transparency - personally I feel that would help mitigate some of the angst and disappointment that some people are feeling. There are two distinct tiers of clients, cloud and self-hosted and topics should be highlighted as to who they are aimed at.

I understand some of the in's and out's and whys and wherefores' of how some of these new features operate and what they need to do so and they're not always going to be something self-hosted are able to leverage.

I believe what we are seeing with IPS is both revolution and evolution in terms of the product and the company and where it's heading.  I can't say that I agree with either stance fully, but do understand why this is taking place.

My only real big beef is the pricing structure of the cloud offering, which goes way beyond most hobby orientated clients. Businesses (depending on the business model) could take advantage of the cloud offerings and suck up the price depending on whether they see a ROI and how deep their pockets are.  But over a thousand dollars a year for a hobby site that may or may not take off, that's a big ask. 

I would have thought these new tiers would have sat alongside the existing cloud offerings, not replace them, and be aimed solely at the business market.  There should be an entry level cloud offering so people can test the water, so to speak, and then move on up the ladder if their sites take off.  That's my own take on the matter.  I have a feeling that at some point IPS are going to price themselves out from the smaller client's ability to pay and at a time when we are in a world cost of living crisis and money is tighter than ever, it may not have been such a smart move at this time to whack up the prices.

Whilst the future may be with the larger Enterprise and Corporate clients, it's best never to forget your roots 😉

[Dll]

1 hour ago, AlexWebsites said:

Since video streaming is an enterprise option only

Has this been confirmed - I think @Jordan Miller said it was for 'select' cloud plans?

[opentype]

3 minutes ago, Dll said:

Has this been confirmed - I think @Jordan Miller said it was for 'select' cloud plans?

Well, that’s the “marketing talk” way of saying it. It’s already in black and white on the pricing page: 
https://invisioncommunity.com/buy

[Dll]

Just now, opentype said:

Well, that’s the “marketing talk” way of saying it. It’s already in black and white on the pricing page: 
https://invisioncommunity.com/buy

Ah, well Jordan's original statement feels a bit disingenuous then. Not great, I have to say. 

[Square Wheels]

1 minute ago, opentype said:

Well, that’s the “marketing talk” way of saying it. It’s already in black and white on the pricing page: 
https://invisioncommunity.com/buy

Yikes, it's only available to those paying more than $549 a month.

I feel so out of place on this site now.  It seems like just a couple of weeks ago the lowest plan included most everything at around $50 a month.  Now it includes less and went up to $89 a month.

Sadly, I suspect they will do away with us in the next couple of years.  Hopefully Xenforo continues to improve and doesn't go this route also.