update: As of 2019-11-09 Hulu is available to all tiered patrons ($5 and above).
Access to Hulu is currently restricted to patrons as part of their early-access privilege. However, to ensure that patrons are able to watch Hulu with their friends, any room that has a patron at any point will have Hulu unlocked for the lifetime of that room.
In addition to Hulu, this update brings a few minor changes. Here’s the full list:
- Added support for early-access features for Patrons
- text-chat: Now supports typing notifications
- room: Fixed invite-list shrinking when selecting many friends
Early-access features
TwoSeven is committed to being a free service. As we’ve grown, it is our patrons that have helped keep the service alive by helping us pay for the (increasing) hosting costs. As a thank-you to them, we are going to be releasing many of our upcoming features to patrons first. Access to these features will be available for everyone after a few weeks.
In cases where such features are useless when available to patrons alone, we will be updating any room that they visit to have access to these features as well. That way, patrons can continue to use the new features by using them in their rooms. Note that this privilege does not spread to users who are in the room with a patron. It only applies to the room.
Once a room is inactive for a prolonged period, the room is reset along with the early-access privilege.
If you would like to help support TwoSeven, you can do so via Patreon or Ko-fi.
Unfortunately, since Ko-fi does not have good integration with Discord, and has anonymous supporters, we’re unable to get in touch with our Ko-fi supporters to add them to our patron list.
If you’re supporting us on Ko-fi, please get in touch with us (Discord/Twitter/Facebook) so that we can add you to the list of patrons. Especially if you’re supporting us every month!
Typing notifications
An oft-requested feature was for typing notifications. Initially, we were hesitant to add support for this as this would mean additional load on our servers to send messages back and forth. But with some neat little tricks, we managed to implement this without much overhead.
At first, we treated text-chat as an ephemeral communication channel that lasted only until participants enabled their webcam and mic. But, over time, we’ve come to realize that text-chat is being used a lot more than we anticipated. As a result, we’re going to make some quality-of-life improvements to the text-chat component over the next few weeks.
