GamesTV.org upgrades its services

Dear community,

GamesTV.org is proud to announce some major upgrades which do not only affect our crew and our broadcasters but also you, the viewers.
The biggest factor that made all this possible, GTVd, is almost ready to be released since the internal betatest showed very promising results. Like ettvd did a few years ago, GTVd will revolutionize the way ETTV (and other games pending) works:

ETTV - Live Casts
One of the biggest changes is that ETTV servers will not run 24/7 cycling through old demos but only run when they are really needed. This may sound bad for some of you at first, but hold on a sec: This frees up valuable resources which go (more or less) directly into the renewed onDemand system - read more about that a few paragraphs below.
The TV servers behave almost the same as you know it, mapevents are still announced with a timer so you always know which team did what quicker, you can follow whomever or whatever and discuss the failings of the players with your co-viewers through the chat, but mind the new anti-spam system:
For every 15 seconds you don't say anything you get rewarded one line to your "chat pool", this way you can collect up to 4 lines - if you speak while you have no lines in your pool (i.e. TOO MUCH) you get silently muted. Coloured lines cost double, they will use up two lines of your pool.
Another thing you'll probably like is the fact that we'll be live on the matchserver 15 minutes before the start - no more watching old demos until the players finally decide to ready up but instead live in the middle of the action at all times. You might also notice that there are only terribly few slots available when a match starts - but as soon as they run in risk of getting full we instantly connect another tv server.

ETTV On Demand
With the new system we have far more influence on what the ondemand replayers are doing. This means we can provide an overall improved ondemand service: No more maps playing in random order, no missing maps which cause the replayer to crash, no more unreliable and inconsistent error messages upon requesting a match.
Add to that the plus of resources mentioned above and the fact that now, when the server which holds the replay you'd like to see is currently unavailable for whatever reason, we can just transfer the demos to another server within the blink of an eye to serve you the match, we should be able to vastly improve the ondemand experience. Furthermore we're fully planning on extending the od-coverage, we aim to have every single match played on GamesTV.org available for viewing on demand.
Also matches which were played but cancelled here on GamesTV.org (for whatever reasons) can now be watched, and from now on you can also request a match every 10 minutes instead of 20 minutes.
You will also notice that we can now provide a set of ingame commands on the ondemand-servers:

• .ff <sec> - forward <sec> seconds. ff 999 during the warmup will jump right to the matchstart (and not further)
  
• .nextmap - jump to the next map of the match
  
• .prevmap - jump to the previous map of the match
  
• .restartmap - restart the current map
  
• .map <num> - jump to one of the maps directly.

If you forget any of those, just type .help and the server will help you out.
And what if you're bored and just want to check out some random matches currently running - as mentioned above the 24/7 replayers are offline :(
We can compensate for that with the all new:

Live Page
See for yourself. It will not only list all currently running live-servers and what they're showing but also all onDemand-servers including what they're showing and when they were started. So even if you just want to see what's going on with nothing particular in mind, there should be something here for everybody. For your convenience this page will autoupdate every 20 seconds always showing current information. Quick access to this page is secured by a link in the top-blackbar - left to the current date and time.

For Players, leagues and requestees
We're confident that we will be able to cast every match added on GamesTV.org, though the automated system will only add servers a couple of hours before the match. So even if it looks like nobody is casting - there is, just wait and see.
Players will be happy to hear that from now on we'll try to hub every single match which will greatly reduce the load on the matchserver. Ideally you'll only see 1 hub, the rest is chained behind it - which brings me right to my next point:
Since we have (fully automated) hubs on the matchservers, we don't need to expose private server information like passwords to anyone. The details of the matchserver will be handled exclusively by a bot and is not run by anyone to leak them.

For (potential) broadcasters
GTVd is intended to relieve you from all the redundand and boring tasks that have to be taken care of to successfully run a (set of) tv server. A quick introducion can be found here, and this page may or may not answer all the questions that pop up in your head.

Of course all these changes can't happen overnight so please forgive us minor interruptions of the service.

The masterminds behind this project are as usual the german duo arni and skooli, but we could not possibly have done it without the support and feedback of countless broadcasters.
To mention a few: Anaconda, andyF1 (never there but always present), h3ll, msh100, ng,
w0nd3r, sHiZo.
Thanks for asking all the questions that needed to be asked, Santa-Claus.