I downloaded the app, which quietly went live on Friday, and browsed through the selection. Currently, there’s categories for Top stories, Obama vs. Romney, Awesome debates, Malala, Tech and Fun. Users can swipe through a selection of video clips for each category. The opening video right now is an original clip that sums up some of the complicated math that Obama and Romney need to pull off to win enough electoral votes.

Most of the clips are introduced by a NowThis News host. Some clips from users or outside sources, like a wordless video of post-Sandy gas lines, are just launched with NowThis News branding. Eason Jordan, a former chief news executive at CNN who is now general manager for NowThis News, told me Monday that the app will get eight to 10 original clips added through the day, which is supplemented by an additional 10 to 15 clips. The goal is to get people watching video news again using the tools they turn to most frequently.

“We feel like younger people are not watching traditional TV news, they’re getting video news from mobile and social, and we’re building for that audience,” Jordan said.

The company, which launched in stealth mode in April under the name Planet Daily and has $5 million in funding, will also be releasing an Android app in the coming weeks. Users can also access NowThis News videos through the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages and through a dedicated vertical on BuzzFeed.

Jordan said NowThis News is trying to escape the trap of being boring by encouraging feedback and interactivity. That means users can submit their own videos, comment on current clips and suggest future stories.

I pointed out to Jordan that some of the content is getting a little stale, including old footage from the presidential debates and a look at the fall from space by Felix Baumgartner. He said the content pipeline is just getting cranked up and will produce even more pieces as NowThis News builds out its team, which is currently at 25 people. He believes a diet of 20 to 25 videos a day will satisfy most users.

NowThis News’ focus on news and interactivity may pit it against HuffPost Live, the Huffington Post’s streaming video network that tries to elicit user participation through webcams, smartphones and tablets. Jordan said that he respects HuffPost Live, but the service is a stream of “talking heads,” while NowThis News lets people choose which videos they want to view.

Election day will be an interesting test of whether watching NowThis News is better than just flipping channels, picking off videos from a user’s social stream or turning to any of the social video apps available.

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But New York City startup GorillaSpot Media has created a new mobile video app called Cliptamatic that looks to combine some of the short communications and sharing of Twitter with branded premium video like Hulu. The goal is to make concise premium video a kind of language that inspires reactions and gets people talking. The app, available for the iPhone, will start with a limited selection of election news, sports and comedy clips, usually no more than 30 seconds long, but will soon expand to movies and TV content.

Here’s how it works: users can choose to follow sports clips from the Big Ten Network to start, subscribing to their favorite conference team’s channel or they can choose from a variety of 2012 election issues, which includes curated content selected by GorillaSpot. There’s also comedy content from Latham Entertainment, which owns the Kings of Comedy and other properties and provides channels for Bernie Mac, George Lopez, Steve Harvey and other comedians. When new clips become available, users get alerted based on their subscriptions. They can also follow other users and see what they’re sharing or find what’s popular in the Cliptamatic network.

When a user finds a video they like, they can easily share it out to Facebook or the Cliptamatic feed with their own caption. The videos will run inside Facebook. Twitter integration is coming soon.

Cliptamatic has limited utility at launch because of its smaller library of content. And if it stays this small, it’s not going to be very useful for people. But there’s reason to believe this can be a more widely used tool because of GorillaSpot’s experience in the premium video world. GorillaSpot, for the last five years, has worked with studios and TV networks, such as Paramount, ABC, CBS, MTV, HBO, AMC, MLB and others, for its products, which include SceneWeaver, a video mashup application, and ReelCards, which provides online premium video e-cards. The company plans on rolling out film and TV content in the coming weeks and months, with many TV clips uploaded within minutes of their airing.

Athan Stephanopoulos, CEO & Founder of GorillaSpot told me GorillaSpot has already done a lot of heavy lifting with content owners and shown them how they can monetize their clips in a safe way. Now, he believes many more will be interested in teaming up on Cliptamatic. Some TV networks may release clips, with short 3-second post rolls that promote a current show. Other movie studios may just want to point to their archive of content. And some media companies may just want to get in now to help build Cliptamatic up into a larger sharing platform.

Stephanopoulos believes that there’s a ripe opportunity in creating a social video sharing service that is built specifically with mobile in mind, so consumption and distribution is easy. And he said premium content is capable of expressing people’s feelings in ways that user-generated content can’t convey.

“We’re trying to create a simple experience for finding content that’s relevant to you that helps you elevate your social conversation,” Stephanopoulos said. “Hulu is like a full meal while YouTube is like an appetizer, but we’re trying to provide the best bite of a meal.”

I think there’s definitely a place for Cliptamatic if it can score the right content. Video is a great conversation starter and tool for expression but I hesitate to use it sometimes because a clip may be too long or I can’t find the right video. And doing it from a mobile device makes it even harder. But if I could find the perfect Will Farrell quote from Anchorman or an illuminating clip from the upcoming debates that, I would love to share it at the right time. Movieclips has some great clips, which are available through YouTube as well, but they’re often a couple minutes long or more and there’s no mobile app.

We’re already used to sharing longer videos on Twitter and Facebook but I think we could see a lot more of that if the content was better packaged for quick sharing. And with the popularity of gifs these days, we’re understanding how short video moments are becoming a form of expression.

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Sumner teamed with David King Lassman to build Vyclone, an iOS app  launching today, that lets people record video and contribute it to a single movie that incorporates multiple angles. Users can create a movie automatically from various cameras in one place or they can edit the footage themselves. It can work for anything from a birthday party or sporting contest to a protest or big news event.

Here’s how it works: users start filming a clip up to 1 minute long before uploading it to Vyclone’s servers. Vyclone automatically senses who else is shooting at the same time and location, kind of like what Bump does when it shares content between two users. The app stitches a video together alternating between the views of the different cameras using a single audio track. After a short time of processing, you have a finished product that takes into account the various points of views of one event.

If users want to apply their own editorial control, they can remix their own cut. Utilizing a simple editing tool, they can edit up to four different video streams into one clip and they can go back in adjust the clips from each camera angle. The app can pick from an almost unlimited number of videos shot at the same time but only four videos can be featured in one movie. The remix tool isn’t just for videos you helped shoot. Other movies from the Vyclone community can be remixed. Finished movies can be shared on Twitter or Facebook or saved to the device.

The app first appeared last month in the UK in what was essentially a beta test. Now, with the formal launch, Sumner and Lassman have added more privacy layers so videos can be shared with just other people shooting video at the same place, the people in their larger social network or the entire community at large. There’s also a delete button for people who reconsider sharing their video and also better UI elements that make the service more accessible.

The goal, said Sumner and Lassman, is to help people record real life and do it in conjunction with others. This kind of “co-creation” requires some tough work in the background, syncing the different videos, normalizing the audio and creating a smart editing system that automatically merges videos into one movie. But the pair believes enabling people to collaborate easily on videos helps encourage more video creation and changes the way people approach video recording and sharing.

“You can share with Facebook, Twitter and Socialcam, but when you’re out in public with your friends, the ability to get everyone’s view point creates stories that more are interesting than something from one angle,” said Sumner. “Video is more complex than other media, but we’ve tried to make it so easy that you expect you’ll have other video that can be synchronized.”

Vyclone co-founders David King Lassman and Joe Sumner

The app is free, but Sumner and Lassman see revenue opportunities in offering premium services such as HD quality video or the ability to cut long clips. There’s also a potential for Vyclone to work with TV networks and live event producers. The company has raised $2.7 million so far from Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s A-Grade, Thrive Capital, Dreamworks and Live Nation.

I’ve played around and made a few videos with Vyclone. It’s not for just any occasion and you have to have a lot of people on the service to take advantage of it. It works best when there’s some coordination going on between shooters, but that also makes it more complicated. So this is not just a casual form of video shooting.

But when you get a groundswell of shooters at one event, it really does help you capture a moment. I would love to have this at a birthday party when the cake comes out or I’d like to use it during an event like the Olympics. I like that you can edit existing videos, too, so you don’t have to be present at an event to create a movie about it. Citizen journalists could use this to show what’s happening on the ground from multiple view points. It’s not trying to be the Instagram of video, but Vyclone offers a fresh take on social video, by making the actual recording and editing more collaborative.

Here’s a little video of Vyclone in action:

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Many simply come home and leave OoVoo on in the background as they do homework or watch TV, sort of like an instant messager app. Friends jump on or jump off, checking in with each other and seeing what’s going on. The person who starts the video chats isn’t obligated to stay on. This is not appointment video: it’s ambient video, running in the background.

Video tells the story

That got me thinking about the evolution video. It’s similar in some sense to how pictures have undergone a transformation. We used to take pictures to preserve memories, using precious film to capture significant moments. But with advent of digital cameras and later mobile phones with cameras, pictures became akin to a casual form of communication, giving rise to services like Instagram and others.

Video chatting and broadcasting is also evolving in a similar manner. We used to think about scheduling Skype chats and video conferences.  Uploading a video to YouTube meant you often edited the video or at least reviewed it. But now, we’re seeing that video is becoming this casual, immediate medium that doesn’t have to convey anything special.

Cheaper broadband+free video services

Jackman believes the rise of ambient video is due to cheaper broadband and the growth of free services that allow users to use video with little regard to cost. The fact that video chatting can increasingly be multiparty also lends itself to this idea of video as an emerging background layer to life.

Google is seeing more people leave Google Hangouts on for long periods of time, according to Iska Hain, a company spokeswoman.

“We definitely see that use case, especially at Google where colleagues will jump into a Hangout from remote offices and we all do work together. Sometimes people do like to just ‘be around’ other people. There are cases of folks turning a hangout on while they go about cooking or knitting or painting,” Hain said.

Foursquare has set up a big screen video portal inside both of its New York and San Francisco offices that are constantly on, allowing people to see each other and organize impromptu meetings.

“I can just go up to the screen and shout someone’s name and they’ll come to the portal,” said Benjy Weinberger, Foursquare’s San Francisco engineering lead.  

Increasingly comfortable with live-sharing

It’s not just with video conferencing. People are increasingly more casual with video sharing as well. I was reminded of this when talking to Bill Nguyen, the co-founder of Color. Color, as we wrote recently, has signed a deal with Verizon to put its live video-sharing app on Verizon phones. The app allows users to start recording a video and alerts their friends that a live broadcast has started.

When I first heard about that, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sending out video before having the option to edit it. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen at the end of that clip. But that’s where things are going. We’ve seen that with other live-streaming services: people are increasingly comfortable broadcasting their lives and letting the world see whatever happens.

Gil Eyal, vice president of marketing for Mobli, a mobile photo and video sharing service, said increasingly people are just uploading videos directly to the service without editing out mistakes or taking a look again at what they’re showing.

“We’re seeing more spontaneous video, it’s all raw and unedited,” said Eyal. “It’s just people being real and video becoming this common language.”

Not everyone is ready for this kind of spontaneous, always-on video world. But it’s a natural extension of the trends were seeing in technology and social media. The barriers separating the private and the public are crumbling thanks to social and technological tools that make it easy to share. The same ideas at work behind Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram, will also spur people to be more open and free with video.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Tyler Olsen.

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Chill launched topical collections of videos last week, allowing users to become curators around a certain topic, and co-founder Brian Norgard told me during a meeting in Los Angeles a few days ago that traffic has gone through the roof ever since.

Check out my interview with Norgard below:

Norgard told me that The Ultimate Steve Jobs Collection has been particularly popular; but the site has also seen a lot of long-tail activity for video collections around subjects like track and field or underwater cinematography that are curated by people devoted to the subject. “Everyone is an expert in something,” said Norgard.

Chill raised a $1.5 million round of funding last September. The company currently employs nine people and is located in West Hollywood.

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VYou is all about community, and so giving its users more options to interact with each other is one way it can try to boost engagement between them. That’s part of the reason why commenting on user videos is so important — it allows them to interact without necessarily recording their own responses.

It’s also why VYou introduced the concept of the “open question,” which its users can ask and have anyone on the site answer. By making questions available to all, it increased the chance of those enquiries — and some of their answers — becoming viral among its users. Vyou now allows users to “own” their questions, so others can see who came up with some of the more interesting ones.

In addition, VYou has improved discovery of popular and featured videos through its browse function, enabling users to find new and interesting users to follow. It also provides featured responses and featured channels, which typically include media outlets like ABC News, Nickelodeon, and Daily Candy, among others. VYou has also attracted users such as Deepak Chopra, Bob Vila, Michael Showalter and Andrew W.K.

Perhaps most importantly, the site represents an evolution in design. According to VYou chief marketing officer Rex Sorgatz, the site’s homepage has been redesigned to feel “lighter” — almost like an app, he told me in a phone interview. The resemblance is no coincidence, particularly as VYou recognizes the opportunity for creating more mobile app experiences. The startup launched an iPhone app in September and plans to release more apps — including one for the iPad and one for Android — in the coming months.

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Among other things, Jun Group is hoping to capitalize on a large — and growing — market for virtual goods. Founder and CEO Mitchell Reichgut said the virtual currency market is worth about $2 billion in the U.S. and $7 billion internationally. Jun Group’s platform offers incentivized video views for advertisers, targeting audiences that play social games. Instead of purchasing virtual gifts, those users can instead watch a video to redeem credits and level up within games.

The end result is a very high completion rate among those who opt in to viewing those ads: upwards of 70-90 percent, according to Reichgut. More importantly, the company is seeing high levels of engagement with viewers clicking through to advertiser websites and store locators after viewing ads.

Jun Group has grown pretty quickly over the last year. Reichgut says the company has 23 employees now, which is up from less than 10 a year ago. And thanks to the new funding, it’s looking to add even more headcount over the next 12 months. Reichgut expects to be in the high 30s by the end of 2012.

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Eye-C’s app taps into your Facebook friend stream, and also allows to connect with other Eye-C users directly and see what media they’ve been sharing. Users can for example search for hash tag, like #occupywallst, and then play a steady stream of videos about the movement.

Of course, the idea to use hash tags for collaborative playlists works both ways: Users can also simply tag something they’ve found online, share it with other Eye-C users as well as people on Facebook and Twitter, and hopefully inspire other people add to it. “Just tag something with a descriptive term, and it becomes a list,” Eye-C CEO Ari Birger said when I talked to him on the phone a couple of days ago. Users can also filter hash tags by friends or simply browse all the media their Facebook contacts have been sharing.

Birger also shared an interesting backstory about Eye-C: The startup initially whipped up a personal media player application called Eyecon, which can still be downloaded from the Android market. The app put a heavy emphasis on DLNA, making it possible to stream content stored on a local hard drive straight to a TV set with DLNA-support while controlling the playback on your handset. However, the interface simply didn’t have mass market appeal, explained Birger, which is why the company decided to fold the technology into Eye-C.

The result is that Eye-C still supports DLNA playback, which allows users to play those hashtag playlists on a TV screen, provided they own a DLNA-certified TV set or connected device. Think of it as Airplay for hashtags, if you will.

Birger told me that the company eventually wants to bring Eye-C to other platforms as well. “We started with mobile because it creates an easy to carry controller,” he said.

One thing that’s still missing from Eye-C is a closer Twitter integration. Currently, users can share videos with their Twitter followers, but not actually follow hash tags bubbling up. I’ve been told that this will be added to the app by the end of fall. I also had some issues getting the app to sync with Facebook on some of my Android devices, and I sometimes found Eye-C a bit too complex to navigate, with too many options available to browse media, friends lists and so on.

Still, I have to admit that the idea impressed me: Hash tags have become a great way of crowdsourced curation, and tapping into that to program your media playlists is a pretty clever idea, especially around any current events.

Check out a few screenshots of the app below:

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Developers will, for instance, be able to integrate videos from sites like Vimeo into Hangouts and allow users to watch them simultaneously. This could not only be a big boost for Hangouts and Google+, but also take social video watching online to the next level.

The API was announced on the Google+ platform blog:

“Today we’re launching the Developer Preview of the Hangouts API, another small piece of the Google+ platform. It enables you to add your own experiences to Hangouts and instantly build real-time applications, just like our first application, the built-in YouTube player.”

The current developer preview limits access to apps to a pre-defined group of users, and a few first examples include simple apps like a voting gadget. However, one only has to take a closer look at the built-in YouTube player to get a sense of how powerful this API can be. The player synchronizes YouTube videos, making it possible to watch clips with friends while also video chatting with them. If a user skips to the next video, that action is automatically relayed to the other participants.

Of course, the same functionality could also be utilized by other video platforms, or even by third-party developers who could make use of publicly available APIs to show videos from sites like Vimeo within Hangouts. Asked about this in a Google+ comment thread today, Hangouts API Product Lead Amit Fulay said: “Yes, you can write an app for Vimeo videos.” He added that apps have to comply with the Google+ developers terms of service, which forbid the use of some types of content.

The implications of this are pretty profound. I’ve long argued that Hangouts could take social interaction around online video to the next level by allowing users to talk to each other in real time, just as you would with family and friends in your living room. The Hangouts API now makes this possible for a wide range of video services, which could bring live sports streams hosted on Ustream or similar sites, or even TV content from sites like Hulu to Hangouts.

Of course, services would have to agree to work within the Google+ framework, but that shouldn’t be a show-stopper for many. Facebook is expected to launch social video integration with Hulu and other partners on Thursday, and it would only make sense for video platforms to embrace Google+ as well.

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Framesocket is designed to make it easy for publishers to create video sites and reach a number of devices. The platform allows publishers to build branded video players and archive pages, and has a flexible encoding engine that creates video files which can be viewed across a wide range of devices including as the iPhone, iPad and Android mobile phones and tablets. It costs just $25 a month for 5GB of storage and delivery, with additional storage and video delivery available in increments of $0.50 per GB storage and $0.25 per GB transferred.

But with the launch of other low-cost options like VidCaster and Vimeo Pro, who really needs another online video platform? Developers, that’s who.

Framesocket was built by the guys behind video real estate platform WellcomeMat and location-based photo- and video-tagging service PegShot. The idea behind creating Framesocket was actually to make it easier to develop their own video-based applications, according to CEO Christian Sterner.

But once it was done and the infrastructure was in place, it made sense for them to open it up to third-party developers. In the same way that 37Signals created Basecamp to handle their own project management needs, then made it available to others, Sterner thinks Framesocket could help those who might want to build apps that leverage video, but without having to create the whole backend from scratch.

Sterner says that if such a service had been available when it launched WellcomeMat, or even PegShot, the startup would have been able to save a significant amount of money by outsourcing much of the heavy lifting to someone else. For startups in the fast-paced world of mobile app development, for instance, plugging into a platform like Framesocket could also speed up development.

In the future, Sterner & Co. plan to do just that: Framesocket will enable the WellcomeMat to easily create white-label video apps for its partners, which include Halstead Properties, Houlihan Lawrence, ForSaleByOwner and Luxury Portfolio.

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