GigaOM » Mark Hall

Showyou updates iPad app with leanback experience

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:00:34 +0000

The social video curation service Showyou released version 4.0 of its iPad app Thursday morning, bringing many features that previously were introduced on the iPhone to the tablet. This includes an auto-play functionality that lets you consume videos from your social networks nonstop, with no additional interaction — something that makes a lot of sense when the videos are beamed via AirPlay to an Apple TV.

Showyou is one of a number of apps that scours your social networks for the videos your contacts are posting, then aggregates those clips in a single location. Mark Hall, CEO of Showyou maker Remixation, didn’t want to share how many users the app has when he stopped by our office last week, but he did offered some other impressive statistics: The company sees an average usage session of over 40 minutes on the iPad, compared to more than 20 minutes per session on the iPhone, according to Hall. Usage peaks between 9 p.m. and midnight, suggesting that many users utilize the app to replace traditional TV.

Speaking of which: I quizzed Hall on why he doesn’t index longer-form content from Netflix and Hulu. Apps like Fanhattan and NextGuide have taken a Showyou-like approach towards filtering long-form TV, but most of them are ignoring the short-form content Showyou is indexing. Does it really make sense to have two separate apps for these kinds of use cases?

His answer: TV shows represent “not that much of a navigation problem.” It’s not that hard to find good stuff to watch on Netflix, he argued, but sifting through the flood of videos on YouTube and Vimeo is much more challenging.

Showyou is built by a team of seven, which is located in San Francisco and Portland. The company raised a total of $1 million in funding, and sold its previous product Vodpod to Lockerz.com.

(Disclosure: Remixation is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)

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Showyou’s latest update adds more ways to discover videos

Ryan Lawler — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:00:16 +0000

Currently most online video services have a sort of hunt-and-peck approach to finding things you might want to watch. You pick a video, watch it and then when it’s done you have to hunt down something else that might be of interest. But the latest version of Remixation’s Showyou app attempts to simplify the discovery process by making discovering new videos easier and more enjoyable.

The latest version of Showyou includes new ways to navigate content by category or by the social network that they’re pulled in from. There’s also a way for users to search and see all content curated by hashtag on Showyou and via Twitter. Finally, the update provides more information about others that you follow and gives you the ability to see what they’ve been sharing b clicking on a user’s avatar.

The trick to what makes Showyou work is that videos play in-line, without users having to exit the app. That reduces the amount of time it takes between finding videos, and there’s always something interesting being shared in the grid. Showyou displays videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Break Media, some Viacom shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as well as videos from The Verge, TED and other Internet publishers. Altogether, the Showyou app pulls in about 5 million videos a day, according to Remixation CEO Mark Hall, or about 150 to 200 each second during peak times.

That’s led to huge amounts of user engagement for its users. While session times on most video sites typically run less than 10 minutes, Showyou users watch about 35 to 40 minutes of video whenever they open the app, or about eight videos per session on average. Online video needs better discovery mechanisms for users, and apps like Showyou are helping to increase viewership and keep users tuned in.

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