Kill Your TV: Social Media Offers New Approach to Online Video Viewing
Showyou, a new iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad app, offers an imaginative take on viewing and watching online videos. It aggregates videos shared on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TED.com and other Internet services and organizes them into elegantly browsed streams.
Displayed as a grid of shows and navigated by using devices’ touchscreens, the program, created by Remixation, lets viewers scroll through and browse videos as they would a wall of TV or film displays. Hoping to become a replacement for prime time viewing, it nonetheless does so without tapping into major TV networks’ schedules or lineups, or blockbuster film distribution deals. However, you can use Apple’s AirPlay technology to stream videos to your television through an Apple TV set-top box. Users can also interact with media by leaving comments on videos, sharing clips among themselves and boosting the content’s popularity.
Showyou makes it possible to view endless hours of Internet programming suggested by friends and social media connections. And it’s free, for now, though the company says it may eventually charge a subscription for premium video access. As much grand experiment in social curation and crowd sourcing as it is possible cable TV killer or quiet media revolution, it promises to offer a fresh perspective on video viewing in the immediate present, if nothing else.