Hey all. It's that time of year again. Till Monday the 26th at midnight PST we're dropping the price of premium memberships to $35. You can grab a code over on this page, and then redeem the code it generates over here. Note that these generate gift subscription codes that you must redeem. So while it's totally OK to use that code on yourself, they're also quite easy to pass along to a friend for the holidays.
For those new to the program, premium members enjoy the following:
- HD video on our Boxee, Roku, Plex and XMBC apps.
- Protected RSS feeds so you can directly download our videos at home.
- Exclusive video content including Jar Time, Random PC Game, Spookin with Scoops, Breaking Brad and monthly call-in shows.
- A dedicated mobile version of the site.
- Zero advertising.
- An enhanced AJAX UI that removes clicks from your browsing.
What this sale membership does not include:
- A coupon for our T-Shirt store. To get that, you can still purchase the full-price membership.
As we mentioned in last week's design chat, the development team here at CBSi is getting close to finishing up the rebuild of the site and we'll be opening up a limited beta in mid-December. That beta will be open to subscribers only. Firstly, because although I'm excited for everyone to see the new site, I do believe there should be some perks for that membership fee. Secondly, and likely more important, is that I'd like to keep things manageable for our dev team and ramp up the numbers as we go. Limiting to a smaller subset of users makes sure the developers can provide at least some level of personal support on the boards as we watch you guys break things!
So again, here's the scoop. Beta site for subs next month, followed by a month of hell for the developers and myself as we fix bugs and shore up the ship. Then in January hopefully a full site launch to everyone. The beta site will be a snapshot and not a mirrored copy of the live site, so any content added during that month to the beta stuff will be wiped away in January. That gives you guys a good opportunity to mess around and gives the editorial team a good trial of our new CMS tools. In the usual Giant Bomb way I imagine Vinny, Jeff and crew will utilize that tissue-paper database for some one-off trial content while we scramble.
In any case, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone (especially our International audience who puts up with these Americanisms). It's been a crazy year for the team here and although I've had to answer "Just what is Giant Bomb?" about twice a week since we've made the move, I'm thankful I can say "A real, god-damned website -- not just someplace you land on" most of the time. Thats a you, not us thing. So thanks, hopefully the long cook time will be worth it.