Now that Showyou has made the remote control obsolete, it has set its sights on the other place we watch video: the desktop. Today, its magical video grid is available on Showyou.com. If you spend any time browsing and watching videos on YouTube.com, your habits are about to change.
The Features
Showyou has YouTube. It also gets videos from Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Vodpod, which is parent company Remixation’s own video-sharing network. You can also follow other Showyou users. When you connect your social networks to Showyou, it starts indexing all the videos from your feeds and presenting them to you in a personalized feed for your surfing pleasure. You can also save videos to watch later, and the list will show up wherever you use Showyou.
It also has fast and accurate search by topic or hashtag. Since it has data about the habits and preferences of avid Web video viewers, as well as social data from a variety of networks, it’s much better at finding relevant videos than any one video site’s search engine.
But the key is in that interface. The magical grid is the most effortless way to discover something new to watch. Forget YouTube’s spam-ridden related videos menu. Forget painful navigation on your TV. Just swipe, scroll, or click and drag in any direction, and Showyou will populate your screen with more videos. When you pick one, it pops up in a full-sized player.
The Showyou Web grid is responsive, so it resizes to fit your browser window. That also means you can use Showyou on any device, even if the native app isn’t supported. “This sets us up nicely to offer HTML5-based experiences on other mobile and tablet platforms,” says Remixation CEO Mark Hall.
For now, you need an invitation to get into the Web view, but if you download the app, you have one. Android users can get Showyou from the Amazon Appstore, but it’s a Kindle Fire-sized version. For those who can’t get into the Web version themselves, any other user can invite you.
Why Move to the Web?
The mobile Showyou app changes the living room. Especially for Apple TV users, the ability to browse videos on Showyou and play them on the TV is enough to make you cancel your cable. (Well, maybe.)
But people still spend an insane amount of time watching videos on YouTube, and that browsing experience is not very good. If you use Showyou on the Web instead, you not only get a better browsing experience that syncs with your mobile devices, but you get videos from across different networks as well.
The social part of the service is one of Showyou’s main reasons for expanding to the Web. “We want to allow all of the people who have our app now to connect with their friends,” says Hall. “Not all of them have an iPad or iPhone. The Web provides a way for people who have the app to connect with their friends, and share videos with them.”
Showyou is doing this to grow the service, but it’s also a win for existing users. There’s now one app for viewing and sharing videos across devices, and you can still get in early and snag a good user name. For an example of what you’ll get, check out my grid: showyou.com/jonm.
It works on all modern browsers (IE 9 support will be finished in coming weeks), but it’s a wee bit slow on Firefox right now. The team is working on it as we speak.