Chill.com Redesigns to Streamline Music Video Discovery
Six months after launching, Los Angeles-based startup Chill has redesigned to make it easier for its 19 million registered users to find online videos.
The social video discovery site taps directly into a user’s social graph through Facebook Connect. Then the user, known as a “curator,” can browse through their friends’ collections or discover new videos based on common themes and interests.
The new Chill homepage spotlights new themed verticals for videos like popular, funny, shocking or sexy. User voting, also newly implemented, will determine which videos get featured in each vertical. Chill hopes this facelift will also help artists like Enrique Iglesias reach their fans, as music videos will be filed under the jukebox vertical.
“The music video is now the most important promotional tool in the arsenal of an artist,” Chill co-founder Brian Norgard tells Rolling Stone. “Music videos are inherently social and play so well in the social graph, it’s impossible to ignore.”
When the Chill platform first launched in January, Norgard and co-founder Dan Gould aimed to create a product that would sidestep the “scavenger hunt” search habits of discovering online videos. Chill allows curators to use their personal interests and social graph to filter out relevant videos and find new content.
“Even before Lana Del Rey rocketed to fame, a passionate group of her fans posted literally everything she had ever done onto Chill,” Norgard says. “Within days, the entire community was addicted to her style.” He calls this phenomenon “social, music taste making in real-time.”