the videos you’ve shared or commented on, in a long scrolling list. This is, in effect, ShowYou’s social meeting place, dedicated to conversation rather than discovery.
Hall says Remixation, which has raised an undisclosed amount of venture funding from San Francisco-based True Ventures and several individual investors, could eventually make money on ShowYou by selling brands cost-per-view ads or other types of ads within the platform, or by creating a subscription-based premium version of the app, or both.
ShowYou isn’t perfect, in part because it isn’t finished, and because the world of online video is still evolving. Right now, ShowYou can only see videos shared by your friends from Twitter, Facebook, and VodPod; there are plans in a near-future update to add Tumblr to the list. The list of video sources is limited too, mainly because iOS devices can only play video that’s been transcoded into the H.264 format—which, at the moment, largely narrows things down to YouTube and Vimeo. “We’ll add other publishers, but you still have a lot of legacy Flash video out there,” says Hall.
A whole universe of commercial content—from sports clips to network shows to Netflix videos—will probably never show up in ShowYou. “There is never going to be a product from anyone that has all [Internet] video in it, not the way the rights work, not in our lifetime,” Hall says. “We’ll be best from the middle of the long tail out to the end, and we’ll probably stay away from trying to aggregate branded content, at least in the short term. You don’t want to start holding negotiations with Disney or NBC—I’ll let the younger entrepreneurs tilt at those windmills.”
But ShowYou may not need Disney or NBC content to start competing with the traditional prime-time lineup. “We know that people are watching more video online from more sources, and we know that these devices are heavily used in the home between 8:00 pm and 11:00 pm,” Hall notes. Moreover, the AirPlay integration ties the devices running ShowYou straight to consumers’ big screen TVs. “And some of this [YouTube and Vimeo content] is more interesting and better, frankly, than a lot of what I find on TV. So I like to think this has as chance of replacing a lot of what’s on TV.”
It’s an ambitious vision—but that’s how revolutions get started.
Here’s a video about ShowYou provided by Remixation.
Let’s Showyou (2) from Showyou on Vimeo.
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ShowYou Will Change How You View Videos on Your iPad (ReadWriteWeb)
VodPod Founders Launch Showyou, A Social Video App For iOS (TechCrunch)
Showyou Brings Flipboard Experience for Video to iPhone, iPad (Mashable)
New app Showyou shows you a social video grid (CNET)
Showyou: An iPad Experience for Shared Videos (AllThingsDigital)
Watch and share videos on your iPad the easy way with Showyou (VentureBeat)
The most important new protocol since RSS: AirPlay (three cool new apps that use it to change how we view TV) (Scobleizer)
