A startup called SocialVision made waves last week with the introduction of an application called YouTubeSocial, which enables users to create social “viewing parties” around a certain video or videos. But YouTubeSocial is only part of the story.
YouTubeSocial lets anyone start up a chat room where they can watch YouTube videos with their friends. All a user has to do to set up a new session is to enter the word “social” into the URL of the YouTube video and use Facebook Connect to send requests to friends. The person that begins the viewing session can then control the video playback for everyone as it is synchronized across all users.
While it’s pretty cool, YouTubeSocial is only a proof-of-concept mockup of the type of social interactivity that SocialVision can — and is — building out for premium content providers. In that way, SocialVision is very similar to ClipSync, which powers the social video player for Epix and MySpace, among others.
Not only does the SocialVision technology work with YouTube and for videos delivered through the Brightcove player, but the company has also enabled some players delivering ads to have the same chat functionality. So users can chat through and comment on ads that are delivered, rather than clicking away or shutting down the player.
We’re big believers in how social viewing can increase engagement for web video, something that’s much more applicable to most premium, long-form content than the short-form videos that dominate YouTube — which is good news for SocialVision. SocialVision currently has six employees, most of which were alums of UC Berkeley. The startup is currently being incubated out of I/O Ventures, and is self-funded.
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