October 8, 2015

• Added initial channel support for bots (no Telegram clients support this at the moment, please wait for updates):
• The Chat field in the Message is now of the new type Chat.
• You can now pass a channel username (in the format @channelusername) in the place of chat_id in all methods (and instead of from_chat_id in forwardMessage). For this to work, the bot must be an administrator in the channel (and that‘s exactly what Telegram clients don’t support yet — adding bots as administrators coming soon).

https://core.telegram.org/bots/api-changelog