Indie Game‘s story began on the web, thanks to Kickstarter funding, and covers a topic near and dear to the Internet’s heart: the rise of the independent video game designer.

So while, according to co-director James Swirsky via email, the theatrical release and an earlier sold outscreening tour were profitable ways of building word-of-mouth about the film, making the film available online was extremely important to him and co-director Lisanne Pajot, as “that is where our audience is.”

“We wanted to get this film into the hands of those people who want to see it the most as quickly as reasonably possible,” he added. “Which is the main motivation behind the very tight release windows we’re working within.”

Indie Game‘s digital release will come through three platforms — one expected, two unconventional. The film, like many independent films before it, will be available on iTunes, but it’ll also be released by VHX as a direct DRM-free download — the second-ever project to be distributed by VHX, following their release of Aziz Ansari’s comedy special last April.

The story of how Indie Game ended up working with VHX couldn’t be more webby. Via the film’s extremely active Twitter account, the filmmakers mentioned they were looking for a distribution platform — instantly, Andy Baio (@waxpancake) connected the two:

Check the date stamp on that tweet — it’s less than two weeks ago. Only nine days after making contact, Indie Game‘s deal with VHX was solidified. “A new record for us, and a trend we hope will continue,” VHX co-founder Jamie Wilkinson said via email.

There’s no exact date yet on when the VHX for Artists platform will be officially open for all, according to co-founder Casey Pugh, but “it will be soon,” he promised.

In addition to iTunes and VHX, Indie Game will also be distributed through Steam, Valve’s video game distribution platform. That’s right, a gaming platform. According to Swirsky, with the exception of a zombie film created by Valve employees several years ago, Indie Game is the first film to ever receive major release through the popular service.

However, the decision to work with Steam made sense for Swirsky and Pajot, because of the film’s deep connections with the independent gaming community. “From a pure distribution standpoint, we can not get any closer to our core audience that being listed side by side with the games that are featured in the film,” Swirsky said. “If you like and bought Super Meat Boy, Braid, World of Goo, etc, there’s a good chance you might be interested in the backstory behind those games, and games like them. Steam brings us to the core of our most relevant audience in a very unique way. It’s kind of amazing.”

Across platforms, the cost will be $10, though those pre-ordering on Steam can purchase it for $8.99. According to Swirsky, “When it comes to sales and knowing their consumer base, Steam is second to none. They know their stuff. They know how to effective launch, maintain and promote the products within their system. When they suggested debuting with a pre-order pricing incentive, it made a lot of sense to us.”

To Swirsky and Pajot, each platform has its unique advantages. Steam, as previously mentioned, delivers the film to the most passionate portion of its fanbase. With iTunes, he says, it’s “a juggernaut. We always wanted this film to be there. They bring an audience and ease of purchase/viewing that we could only dream of with this film.”

And working with VHX, Swirsky says, “allows us to continue the direct conversation with our audience that we’ve been having since Day 1. It’s all on our site, it’s all under our control, it’s as personal as delivering the final film to the end audience as we can get digitally. VHX is doing some really exciting things. We’re really proud to be a part of it all.”

“It’s truly a great film. It also perfectly aligns with our beliefs on the future of film,” Pugh said. “Crowd-funded on Kickstarter and self-released on VHX. This is where the film, video and television business is going and it’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

Between the three platforms, Swirsky and Pajot are hopeful to not only make up the actual production budget of the film, but also compensate themselves for the two years they spent making the film. “The film is very much on track to make back its budget. But that’s a budget that doesn’t include paying ourselves for the past two years. If we go by that budget, we still have a little ways to go. But it should be worth it,” Swirsky said.

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Plizy is one of many apps attempting to tackle the issue of video discovery on the iPad. With a growing number of video publishers supporting the tablet and other mobile devices, the ability to navigate and find relevant, interesting content from what seems like a near-infinite number of sources is becoming a chore. But despite the ability to connect with Facebook and Twitter friends to see what they’re watching and sharing, Benassaya says only a small minority of video consumed comes from those recommendations. Just how small? About 25 percent, according to the Plizy founder.

Instead, a growing number of users are watching videos from Plizy Buzz — a sort of “what’s trending” among videos being watched within the app — as well as a number of editorially curated channels that the Plizy team have put together. Those include topical subjects like a Steve Jobs memorial channel and one devoted to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Since videos from social recommendations remains a small portion of its viewership over the past six month, Benassaya has become bullish on other forms of discovery. The team is working on enabling search in a future version of its app, and hopes to build a smarter recommendations engine based on what users are watching in the future, in effect downplaying the social element.

In that respect, Plizy’s strategy runs a bit counter to the growing number of apps and websites that are focused on surfacing videos based upon recommendations made by connections on social networks. Over the past six to 12 months, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of startups focused on bringing together videos that have been shared socially; there’s Showyou; there’s VHX.tv; there’s Shelby.tv; there’s even Boxee’s iPad app. Each differs in its implementation and feature set, but the concepts are pretty similar.

There are a few reasons why social recommendations might not work as well as other discovery mechanisms, Benassaya posits. One is the novelty factor: Users might find videos recommended on Facebook or Twitter interesting at first, but realize they’re not that relevant as time goes on. Another is that the number of contacts on social networks that a user actually shares interests with is usually pretty low.

That’s not to say that social won’t be important for surfacing new content, or in connecting a sort of social graph of recommendations based on like-minded interests. But today’s usual implementation — wherein videos are surfaced based on the fact that they’re shared, without any further filtering mechanism — probably has limited utility as smart recommendation algorithms begin to take over.

Disclosure: Showyou maker 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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Shelby.tv launched in closed alpha earlier this year, debuting an easy-to-use, leanback experience for discovering videos that connections have shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. All users have to do is log in with Facebook or Twitter (or both) and they will be shown a continuous feed of videos from those networks. Users can then also share videos with their own friends and followers, like them or bookmark them for later.

In addition to its website, the startup has expanded its availability with the introduction of an iOS app that will bring similar functionality to the iPad and iPhone. Shelby.tv CEO Reece Pacheco told us in a phone interview that the goal was to make the service available beyond just a user’s web browser. “The thing that’s really cool is to extend this beyond the desktop,” Pacheco said. “At night you don’t really want to hop on your computer, and now you can browse these videos in bed on your iPad.”

Over the last few months, the Shelby.tv team has been working on improving its user experience, including de-duplicating videos shared by multiple connections. Now when that happens, the application and website note all the folks who have shared it. It’s also been working on adding content from new video sources. In addition to displaying videos from YouTube and Vimeo, Shelby.tv recently added videos from Hulu as well.

The public launch is a big step forward for Shelby.tv, which will now compete on a broader scale with similar social discovery tools like VHX.tv, Showyou and Boxee’s iPad app. Each has its own way of allowing users to discover, share and bookmark videos that their friends have shared.

Shelby.tv was part of TechStars’ first class of New York startups, and raised $1.5 million in a round led by Avalon Ventures that also included angel investors like DFJ’s Tim Draper, Buddy Media’s Mike Lazerow, Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan and Hearst’s George Kliavkoff, among others.

(Disclosure: Showyou 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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VHX.tv co-founder Casey Pugh told me Tuesday during a Skype conversation that Musicvideogenome.com was primarily meant to showcase the power of VHX’s new API, which was also released this weekend. The site allows users to enter the name of an artist and then simply press play. Musicvideogenome.com immediately queries Last.fm to get recommendations for similar artists and then builds a playlist of YouTube videos based on those recommendations. The result is a personalized music video stream that works in a similar fashion to Pandora’s radio streams.

Musicvideogenome.com doesn’t offer users a way to vote on each track in the way that Pandora does, but it has some possibilities for interaction that take into account any holes in YouTube’s catalog. “It’s surprising how almost every song is on YouTube,” Pugh told me. However, some of these videos simply display a song’s cover art — which isn’ really a great visual experience if you’re trying to serve up a stream of engaging music videos. Users have the chance to flag these videos and suggest links to better versions, which can be both official and unofficial versions. “If there is no official music video, maybe a fan can make one,” suggested Pugh.

There are plenty of other sites that offer their own take on this kind of mashup between music videos and recommendation data. Ryan Lawler wrote about a more editorially guided approach at Cull.tv on Monday. We previously covered ListandPlay and Tubeify, and just last week, received a pitch for a site called Look.fm that bills itself as an “easy way to listen (to) music from YouTube” and that makes use of the YouTube data API to filter out any non-music content.

I wrote back in 2007 that mashups are becoming a sort of litmus test for startups. Back then, I asked: “Is there really a business model for a startup if someone else could achieve the same thing with a quick mashup?” That’s still a valid question, but in the case of Pandora, there’s more to it: The company has built its streaming service based on the DMCA’s definition of non-interactive music services, which means it has to adhere to some strict rules to avoid direct licensing negotiations with record labels.

Pandora’s users can, for example, only skip songs six times per hour, and the company can’t play more than three songs of the same artist within a three-hour period. All of this allows Pandora to pay rights holders through collective licensing, but even those fees add up to millions per year, and fee changes brought Pandora close to bankruptcy in 2008.

Mashup makers, on the other hand, don’t bother with any of these rules, but simply take publicly available videos and leave the licensing details up to YouTube and others. That kind of behavior may scare rights holders, but Vevo’s success and Google’s monetization of fan-made content have both demonstrated there’s money to be made in music videos — and mashups like Musicvideogenome.com could play a big role in this type of monetization in years to come.

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VHX allows users to watch streams of videos that their friends share on social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Once users sign up and connect their social networking accounts, those users are fed a continuous stream of videos that their friends have shared with them. They can comment on, like and share those videos with other followers on VHX or friends on other social networks. And now, all of those functions are optimized to work on the iPad and iPhone.

But why create an iPad-optimized mobile site? Why not just create a native iOS app? VHX co-founder Casey Pugh wrote to us in an email:

“We went with mobile web because it’s simply very easy for us to do and wanted our community to have VHX anywhere as soon as possible. It also makes it very easy for us to extend compatibility to Android and other mobile platforms. Currently, the only advantage a native mobile app will have is that it will be smoother and faster.”

While the mobile website might lack some of the speed that a native app would bring, it still takes advantage of one of the iPad’s biggest features: AirPlay. With AirPlay, the iPad-optimized VHX site allows users to push videos to the Apple TV, letting them view any video they discover on the iPad to the big screen.

That said, Pugh wrote that native apps for Apple devices are coming soon. And VHX is also trying to optimize its site for other mobiles devices that viewers might want to tune in on. “We’re focused on building the best possible viewing experience for web video, and designed our web interface to work on all the possible devices we use,” Pugh wrote.

While VHX is working on expanding its platform to other devices, it’s not the only startup focused on the issue of social discovery for web video. Shelby.tv has a similar full-screen web experience for discovering videos from your friends on social networks. Remixation’s Showyou app, which launched with a native app on the iPad earlier this year, also hopes to make it easier for users to find and share videos on social networks. Even Boxee is getting into the mix, launching an iPad app last week that seeks to combine social discovery with bookmarking and home media viewing.

Update: In a followup email, Pugh writes that he’s also tested the mobile site on Android devices and it also works, although it’s not as stable as the iPhone or iPad.

(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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Of course, this is just a first trial run, and you’ll have to excuse any roughness around the edges. After all, we are still just playing around with this. However, we do feel that social video experiences like the ones enabled by Google Hangouts are a big deal and we want to explore ways to use them in our day-to-day work here at NewTeeVee, showcasing both online videos and the people who shape this industry. Expect more videos like this on the future — and in the mean time, check out the clip showcased by Wilkinson and Pugh below:

Show notes:

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Co-founded by online video pros Casey Pugh (whose past work includes Boxee, Vimeo and an Emmy) and Jamie Wilkinson (the co-creator of Know Your Meme and Mag.ma), VHX serves a two-fold purpose, offering a social dashboard of videos being shared by other users, as well as the opportunity for users browsing elsewhere to queue up videos for later viewing. The idea, according to Wilkinson told us in a phone interview, is to solve the problem of how people watch and share videos with friends.

VHX addresses the same concept that other startups have approached — that is, the idea that the best way to discover new content is not through an algorithm, but through social interaction. But a number of factors help it stand apart. One is its dramatic design, in which the video takes over the entire browser window for distraction-free viewing, with the dashboard and other features (including the ability to like, queue up and share videos across multiple social platforms), given a low profile. While not all videos are high-res enough to make this rewarding, a short film available in 720p or higher pops nicely.

Another distinction is its current user base, which is largely made up of high-level “power consumers” of online video — which is to say, the hip cool kids who always see hot new virals first. According to Wilkinson, VHX now has 5,000 users in private beta, most of whom are pretty active users of the site and represent many of that elite. Just some of those actively participating include Laughing Squid’s Scott Beale, video remix artists Wreck and Salvage and College Humor co-founder Jakob Lodwick.

“I’ll see it on VHX 24 or 48 hours before anywhere else,” Wilkinson said, describing the typical VHX stream as “a blend of the Boing Boing front page and Failblog front page. Your standard internet fare, with an extra dose of Vimeo.”

But the exact balance of content at this stage depends on which VHX users you follow, though users coming through the public beta will have the ability to pull in videos from their social streams, including Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. In addition, Wilkinson and Pugh are working on the ability to import big blogs — like, say, Laughing Squid or Boing Boing — as viewable streams. “We’re really excited about adding playlist features and more powerful curation stuff,” Wilkinson said. Currently, VHX only works with YouTube and Vimeo videos; support for other players including Blip.tv, Dailymotion and Livestream is in progress.

VHX at this stage is self-funded, with one major contribution, according to Wilkinson, being the recent seven-figure sale of Know Your Meme to the Cheezburger Network, from which he and the other creators of KYM benefited from financially. Early conversations about seeking out a round of funding are also happening.

Monetization, though, comes from what Wilkinson referred to as the “three As” — apps, ads and accounts (specifically, pro accounts), with an emphasis on offering premium features over advertising. The upcoming iOS app, he says, will likely be a paid offering — in addition, a Boxee app for leanback viewing is also in development.

But even stuck inside the browser, VHX does stand out as a solution to the “I want to see something new” problem, especially when either your personal dashboard or the curated Discover section are allowed to play as a continuous stream. Letting VHX play for twenty minutes on random, for example, exposed me to strange animation, a Sesame Street clip, an A-plus cat video and some dazzling time-lapse cinematography — none of which I’d ever seen before. Which is the very definition of discovery.

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