Since there was no site for KGSPlus wishes, I added it.
If there will be more wishes, maybe someone can give this site a better layout.
KGS Plus Wish List
Accessing old lectures
- i'd like to be able to set the start date of my subscription so that I can watch older lectures. (excession)
- wms restricted the access to prevent people seeing older lectures. If anything maybe one can hope that he'll make them availible by extensing your time backwards at a lower cost (as no turnaments and such would be availible...)... Reuven
- claintThis is actually a very bad marketing stragedy. If you let the older lessons be viewable, the 'value' of the kgs membership increases with time, thus will cause more subscriptions as more lessons pile up. Right now, you make people wait for their investment, they don't get immediate reward when they sign up. You think you are forcing people to sign up early, but you are forgetting that you are also forcing some to not to sign up, because you are not treating everyone equal.
- wms: Claint, I think you have it backwards. If KGS plus would let you see all lectures ever, no matter when you sign up, then the longer you wait to sign up, the more you get for your money. To me it seems that any business plan that encourages people to wait as long as they possibly can before paying for anything is extremely foolish. Like most people running a business, I want my orders to come in as soon as possible, so I set it up so that the sooner you sign up, the sooner you start building up a library of lectures that you can watch!
- claint I guess I should have been more clear. What i am against, is that you can never see the old lectures. I am not against old lectures being accessable by money. That is why I wrote the previous post as a subtopic to the above wish item. But this got me thinking about the business model. I feel we both made the same wrong assumption on our above posts. I had moved that discussion to KGSOldLecturesDiscussion.
- SirLyric: Though I can see Claint's point as well, wms is exactly right about the disincentive to subscribe. What I would like to see, though, is the capability to access old lectures when you renew a lapsed membership. Of course not those that occurred while you were lapsed (otherwise, again, disincentive), but if I'm a member for five years, say, and I let my membership lapse for a month, and then come back, I think it's only fair to still be able to access the older lectures I could before, rather than losing all access to them. This would obviously have to be specific to a username, of course. Thoughts? (Thanks for putting together such a great service, I'm really enjoying it!)
- SirLyric: As a further thought, wms, I wonder if you might consider letting KGS Plus lectures lapse into public accessibility, say, after two years, or maybe a selection of the very best? This might also help to build demand as users get a taste of what they'd see...
- wms: Ah, now I see it. Yes, I do hope to offer old lectures eventually. I just am not ready for that yet, but I hope to eventually either offer people a way to buy a "backdating" of their subscription, or else possibly just put up the old lessons on a pay-per-view type system. We'll have to see which works out. For the pay-per-view, I'll probably have to talk to the original instructors first; my agreement with them is very weak (well, there is none, I just send them a check and they give a lecture), but doing a pay-per-view system is "different" enough from the original use that I think I would have to talk to them about it first.
- RiffRaff: What I'd like to see is not pay-per-view, but a way of "upgrading" an existing subscription to include the older lectures through a one-time fee. Basically paying once to backdate your subscription. I also think it'd be a good idea to designate one of the older lectures as a free lecture that can be viewed by anyone, as an example to non-subscribers of what KGS Plus lectures are like.
- CulleyHarrelson I run several on-line businesses. In the online world content = traffic = money. You have a great set of content here. You are limiting your business by not providing access to the old lectures in some form. For my part, I have favorite lecturers-- I would like to see old content based on the teacher, or the subject if there is an old lecture that meets my current study topics. I understand your hesitation to make *all* old lectures available with a membership but I think you would be surprised of the effect. I work for a $1.5M+ company that has a similar ever-growing library of content and you get full access to all the content when you join. Your renewal rates would increase. On another note I would love to see regular new commentaries of pro games by pros included with the plus membership.
- blubb: How about something along the lines of
http://www.audioeurogolessons.com? As far as I see, many lectures offered there stem from KGS anyway, but the set of teachers is restricted. Maybe the projects could cooperate for KGS+ in general?
Anyway, that's just another idea. Actually, I find the "membership backdating" most reasonable, where you can buy some months' lessons later on (preferrably for a somewhat reduced price, since you don't get tournaments nor interactive live lectures).
- nachtrabe In the "Lectures" submenu it would be nice if by each lecture we could see the format (e.g., audio/text), the language (so far all English?), the length, and one or two words describing the topic (e.g., the 5 March 2005 Lecture by Shen Jing, 2p was on Joseki).
Stone sound for moves, bell (or some such) for text
jfc: I just signed up for KGS plus and have been watching an old lecture. It would be nice if there were sounds to tell me when to look at a new text message. Perhaps all KGS game boards could allow the player to enable/disable stone sounds and a kibitz bell independently.
During the lecture the presenter often sets up a position and then asks a question. At this point I stare at the board and think. Having a kibitz bell would tell me when the teacher (or anyone else) has "spoken" again.
Reminders
SirLyric: It would be great to be able to sign up for reminder emails about lectures, perhaps the morning of, or n hours beforehand. I always forget! This would also help with situations like this month, where guojuan's lecture time is tentative.
Saving non plus lectures
Batavia?: It would also be nice if KGS-Plus members could save non plus lectures. The Ing foundation and Skyghost are offering free lectures. At this moment the best i can do is to save the sgf. It would be nice if KGS Plus members could also save the soundtrack (just like normal plus lectures). Maybe, to save harddisk space, this could be done only for the few 'big' lectures like those of the Ing Foundation and Skyghost so it would only have to be saved once for all kgs plus memers.
Lecture metadata
Pel?: The main reason I'd like this is that I often find myself wanting to review something I remember from a lecture by someone sometime ago.. even if i know it's goujuan a couple of months ago - it's really time consuming to find it.
It would be really awesome if I could tag lectures with keywords that are relevant to me, that doesn't have to be stored serverside even though i'd prefer it (same thing goes for buddies btw). E.g.: "ThreeSpaceJump?", "HoninboGame?", "3-3Joseki".
Another cool alternative would be if there was a text associated with each lesson that subscribers could edit so you'd get an idea what the lesson covers.
KGS Plus User Account Association
tealeaf Whilst I imagine multiple user accounts are discouraged, many people do maintain them. Would it be possible for a KGS Plus subscription to be associated with an email address rather than a user account? This would allow a user with multiple accounts to always access KGS Plus lectures without logging in and out, or to allow easy access when an old account falls into disuse.
wms: Here's a problem that will mean I can't possibly do it: If teahouse@gmail.com (for account "teahouse") has KGS Plus, then I just set my own email to be teahouse@gmail.com, watch a few lectures, then put it back to wms@igoweb.org again. Wow, free KGS Plus! :-( Sure, I could say "well, you have to *set up* the account with that email address, so that it is confirmed," but that adds a whole lot of mess. And what about when you change to teahouse@hotmail.com? Etc. It just isn't practical.
Audio Overdrive
Many of the lectures do not know how to set their levels and their audio can be inaudible over laptop speakers without significant rerouting. Audio overdrive similar to what's avaliable on audiogolessons.com would be very useful.
rs220675?: What about a rating certificate like IGS alsready has. Would be very motivating to get KGSPlus plus you could demand some extra money for it. Of course the rating would have to be somehow realistic.
Audio Lecture Captions
Make available a captioned version of kgsplus lectures. Maybe multiple versions for different languages. I'm sure we could get volunteers to help transcribing. (There are deaf kgs plus subscribers)