We recently got a preview of an upcoming product called Vidrollr meant to help TV shows and other brands connect with their fans. Vidrollr comes in the form of a widget or ad unit and enables users to upload short clips from their webcams. The idea — in the vein of recent TV social media experiments like Fox’s “Tweetpeats” — is none too complicated. Cast members and writers post videos to start conversations or solicit feedback from fans. Fans respond with videos of their own. Since the entire thing is packaged as a widget, fans can also embed the conversation on their own blogs and social network pages.
Vidrollr is made by the folks at Invoke Media, a Vancouver, Canada-based interactive agency that also makes HootSuite, a corporate Twitter manager. Invoke is being shy about making screenshots public, but I thought the idea was worth mentioning. Vidroller will roll out as a revenue share with content partners — video game portals, dating sites and non-profits are other potential clients in addition to TV networks — so we’ll keep you updated if deals get signed. Invoke said it thinks it can launch with its first partner in the next month, but we’ll have to see.
Vidrollr isn’t a giant leap forward, but rather a video twist on text chat widgets such as Meebo Me. It seems most similar to Seesmic, which originally launched similar video conversation functionality as a standalone site but ended up finding a more interesting business in social web product aggregation. However, the broad space of “social TV” is a tricky one, as we’ve been learning lately, and it may just have been that Seesmic didn’t have the right combo of interface, content or social connections.
Invoke partner Dario Meli told us he thinks Vidrollr has the right approach because it has a nice threaded interface with a thumbnail trail of all the videos, it offers moderation tools should its partners want to implement them, and it’s pretty and simple. We have to imagine parsing through video conversations will still take some work on the part of users — but if the right content partner comes on board, fans will put up with just about anything.
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