July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Video discovery app ShowYou Taking is pushing out a new social feature. The app will now let you share the viewing experience with your friends.

Version 4.1 of the free ShowYou app, launching today for the iPhone and iPad, adds a social tray that lets you easily invite friends to join in on a video. The tray also lets you see what your friends have been doing on ShowYou, which could lead you to interesting videos.

ShowYou has relied on social feeds for content recommendations since the beginning, but the new feature makes the app almost akin to watching TV on the couch with your friends.

“At some point over the past six months, our team became more acutely aware that we were all watching and sharing videos on the app at the same time (generally, in the evenings and on the weekends, which are peak usage times for Showyou),” wrote Mark Hall, chief executive of Remixation, the company behind the app, in a blog post this morning. “Knowing we were on the app at the same time, we wanted to have better ways to connect, to signal to one another what we were watching. We wanted to get closer to the ideal of being able to watch together even though we were not in the same place (our team is split mainly between Portland and San Francisco with a cowboy loner out in Oklahoma City).”

San Francisco-based Remixation has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a first round from True Ventures and other investors.

After relaunching as a social video network more than a year ago, Telly (formerly the Twitter video sharing service TwitVid) is now focusing even more on video discovery with the launch of My Telly.

The new product algorithmically generates videos that interest you on Telly’s website and mobile apps, based on what your friends have liked, posted, watched, and discussed. Additionally, the company announced that it has reached 7 million unique users, doubling its user base over the past seven months.

“We started Telly to fix video discovery across the web,” said Telly chief executive Mo Al Adham in an interview with VentureBeat. But the company learned it also needed to do more than just show you the videos your friends are posting on social networks. “We had to add more signal to the feed … we asked ourselves how do we pain a more complete picture of what your social graph is doing,” he added.

The answer for Telly was algorithms — instead of just fishing the videos your friends posted online, My Telly also looks at what your social network is engaged with, and it also keeps track of your viewing habits to figure out what you like. It also takes into account the device you’re using, so longer videos will be prioritized on the desktop, while your smartphone will get shorter clips.

The focus on algorithms is likely a smart move for Telly, as algorithms are increasingly becoming important for all media discovery services.  Consumers are increasingly expecting web services to know what they like, and to present meaningful content without much legwork.

Telly still allows you to upload your own videos, but that’s clearly not as big a feature as it was in the TwitVid days. At the same time, video uploads let Telly straddle a line the normally separates social video apps. ShowYou, for example, is entirely focused on video discovery, while Vine is finding success with its simple video sharing.

“We’ve rallied the entire team around having one unified mission … a mission to communicate to the end users and give them a great content experience on Telly,” Al Adham says. Engagement is surprisingly high on the service, with most users spending around 17 minutes on the site, and typically watching four videos, with every visit.

Looking ahead, Al Adham tells me the company is also looking closely at smart TV platforms, starting with open platforms like Google TV. Like most video services, he wants Telly to be available on every screen a user is watching.

San Francisco-based Telly raised around $6.5 million as TwitVid from Azure Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Siemer Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The tsunami of video available online is both a blessing and a curse. While there’s a ton of free content out there, it’s tough to just sit back and enjoy online video as you would a traditional TV channel.

That’s a problem that Showyou, a free video discovery app from Remixation, has been trying to solve since it launched last year. Now with Showyou 4.0, the latest version of the app launching today, the company has finally crafted the ideal app for kicking back and and enjoying popular online videos, as well as videos shared by your friends.

“The reason we got excited about [the iPad] originally and started building specifically for it was because it was the most likely to have that [prime time TV watching] characteristic,” Mark Hall, chief executive of Remixation, told VentureBeat in an interview. Not surprisingly, Hall notes that Showyou’s peak usage is from 9 p.m. to midnight.

Instead of piling on new features that make the app more complex, Remixation focused on simplifying the overall experience of the app. News users can log in and start finding interesting videos quickly. And returning Showyou users will find a more useful video feed, dubbed the “Smart Feed,” that does a better job of picking the best videos for you; more than 100 new content channels; and the ability to switch between a grid view and a more information-soaked “feed view.”

Many of the features hitting Showyou’s iPad app today first appeared in its iPhone app, which received a significant revamp in July. That makes a certain amount of sense: As the company learned how to optimize its interface for the iPhone, it was able to translate many of those lessons to the larger-screened iPad. It’s app design is reminiscent of trimming a bonsai tree.

Showyou is now approaching 100 million indexed videos, the company says, with 250,000 to 300,000 videos added every day to its search index. The company has compiled more than 1.5 billion “social signals,” which include data from tweets and other services, in its index.

There have also been lots of changes to Showyou that simply makes it easier to use. Instead of swiping its video grid in four directions, which was cool but kind of confusing in prior versions of the app, now you just have to swipe up and down. That makes using Showyou more like Pinterest, Instagram, and other popular social services. You can also swipe left or right while a video is playing to move to the next one, or have the videos automatically play (so it really does feel like a TV channel).

When I tested out the new Showyou app, finding and watching videos just felt more seamless. You can select video topics within the new feed view, which can easily send you down a rabbit hole of interesting videos. There are also more ways to share videos with your friends, and you can now multitask while using Airplay on the iPad to push videos to an Apple TV.

San Francisco-based Remixation has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a first round from True Ventures and other investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Good news for couch potatoes: The popular video discovery app Showyou now has a revamped Airplay experience, allowing you to run other apps on your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch while Showyou is beaming video to your Apple TV.

The newest version of the free Showyou app, which hits the App Store today, also includes some major improvements on the iPad, including Retina Display support and social features that first appeared on the Showyou iPhone app a few weeks ago.

Apple has offered multitasking during Airplay streaming since the launch of iOS 5 last year, but according to Mark Hall, the CEO of Showyou creator Remixation, not many apps have taken advantage of the feature. “It’s not a difficult feature to implement,” Hall said, but added “it takes a ton of effort to figure out what you have to implement.”

Now when you’re streaming a video with Showyou, you’re not forced to keep the app open on your iOS device, which should be a boon for Twitter addicts.

In many ways, Showyou for the iPad is playing catch-up with its iPhone/iPod Touch siblings in this latest update. The iPad app can now take advantage of a whole new Showyou feed, which does a better job of locating videos that you’ll like. You can also now send videos to friends on Showyou via the iPad app (and if they’re not on Showyou, you can send them an email), and “Thank” people for sharing videos.

Showyou now has more than 60 million videos indexed, Hall tells me. And since they’re all socially curated, they’re generally more interesting than a random YouTube video. The company’s revamped iPhone app, which launched last month, is also now seeing longer session times of 15 to 20 minutes.

Showyou is planning to open up its video search to guests within the next few days, which should give new users a taste of what Showyou has to offer before signing up.

San Francisco-based Remixation has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a first round from True Ventures and other investors.

Chill, the social video discovery startup, has closed an $8 million funding round to stay on top of ever-changing entertainment consumption behavior, the company announced today.

Chill started out as a Turntable.fm-style video curation site that let people on Facebook watch what their friends were watching in real-time. It’s since morphed into something that leans more towards a Pinterest for video, allowing people to view recommendations. Chill has 18 million registered users and several major content partners, including TMZ and Jimmy Kimmel Live.

The startup plans to use the new capital to grow its development and distribution of Chill’s intelligent social video recommendation platform. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and William Morris Endeavor, with participation from previous investors.

Founded in 2011, Los Angeles, Calif.-based Chill is a product of Namesake. The company has raised a total of $$9.5 million to date from 500 Startups, Science Media, Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund, Mike Jones, and Redpoint Ventures.